Amerigo Vespucci owned slaves does that mean we should strip the continents of the name America?
So what would you call someone who has gained high-level proficiency in something, or their work? Would you eliminate “masterpiece”? “master’s degree”?
That’s not really my point. It’s that, for anyone who is already familiar with the Audubon Society, the name “Audubon Society” is far more particular and meaningful than something like “Birders Association” would be.
It’s as if the Sierra Club changed its name to the “Outdoors Club.” To someone who doesn’t know what the Sierra Club is, “Outdoors Club” is somewhat more meaningful, but it’s still very vague and general; while to someone who does know what it is, such a change might represent a change in focus or mission or just be confusing.
Did you miss her use of the phrase, “that use” twice?
And “birders” gets used as off color slang, that would be confusing!
No, but it is possible that we are reading “that use” differently. I read it as “My thought is that the word ‘master’ has been deprecated.” it is only after several rereads to try and understand the point she was trying to make in her respose that I realised that it can also be parsed to say “My thought is that a specific utilization of ‘master’ has been deprecated”. The phrasing ambigious in written form.
IAN puzzlegal and cannot speak for her, but my own off-the-top-of-the-head reaction was that the point is clearly that terms like “master/slave router”, “master router” and so on are intended to convey the idea of one participant in an interaction controlling the other one(s).
That, ISTM, is pretty obviously more problematic, in terms of linguistic connotations of human slavery, than terms like “artistic mastery”, “master’s degree”, etc., which are intended to convey the idea of a person being expert in a craft.
I don’t know whether puzzlegal views the distinction that way, but a lot of people who object to terminology like “master/slave network” do.
Thank you @Kimstu , you saved me the trouble of writing that out.
The best reason I can think of to make such changes is to send a message to people living now, not about people who’ve been dead for centuries. That message is: You think you’ve built a legacy that will outlive you? Well, if you have done anything racist, grossly selfish, sexist, or otherwise ethically wrong, it will catch up to you, and your legacy will be wiped out completely. You will be known, not for your accomplishments, but for your misdeeds. Something to think about as you contemplate building your legacy: what the future will make of you.
With a big problem of not knowing what will be thought of as “ethically wrong” in the future.
But another way of looking at this is that the excuse “everyone is doing it” may not fly, so people concerned about their legacy may have to take more personal responsibility for the morality of their actions.
And it’s not as though in Audobon’s time there was universal human consensus that slavery was morally acceptable, that the White race was supreme in the way he conceived it, and that taking credit for other people’s work is fine.
It sends the message that you’re welcoming to people of color and aren’t ignoring the history that the name of the organization represents. It’s a positive statement more than a negative one.
Over three hundred years before Audubon did.
I wouldn’t worry about any supposed “confusion” until we know what they actually plan to change the name to.
Personally, I wouldn’t be particularly bothered if we did; it’s not the end of the world if people have to learn a new name for something.
However, I think it would generally be perceived as superfluous primarily because the name “America” these days is way more important and recognized than the name of Amerigo Vespucci. (And anybody who does know about Vespucci is probably already aware that there was little historical reason to name the New World after him in the first place.)
With the Audubon Society, though, I think it’s the other way around: many people to whom the Audubon Society as an organization means nothing could still more or less tell you who John James Audubon was. So the current named entity is still somewhat secondary to the historical figure who originally bore the name.
Frankly, I wouldn’t mind our society getting over the whole Victorian-era propensity for Naming This Thing After This Idolized Historical Figure. The Audubon Society founded in 1905, the Knights of Columbus founded in 1882, and a whole bunch more. Is it really necessary? The major US freshwater-fishways conservation organization seems to do fine just calling itself “Trout Unlimited”, for example.
That’s a feature, not a bug. It compels you to think about what might well be considered ethically wrong in the future. Or even what is ethically wrong right this second but society hasn’t moved on condemning it. Yet.
Yes - unlike Audobon, I think this one would be closer to the etymological fallacy. What percentage of people in the world know that America derives from Vespucci? I’m confident that it’s less than 10%.
Is there something a little bit screwy about naming a hemisphere after a guy’s FIRST name? We don’t have the city of George in the District of Christopher, and it would sound pretty screwy if we did.
Their focus is birds but they are pretty much like groups like Sierra club, they want to protect areas where birds live and that helps all kinds of wildlife.
The credit given to Vespucci derived from letters of dubious authenticity and even more dubious accuracy; some early cartographers apparently thought the use of his first name was suitably analogous to Europe and Asia getting women’s names.
In April 1507, Ringmann and Waldseemüller published their Introduction to Cosmography with an accompanying world map. The Introduction was written in Latin and included a Latin translation of the Soderini letter. In a preface to the Letter, Ringmann wrote
I see no reason why anyone could properly disapprove of a name derived from that of Amerigo, the discoverer, a man of sagacious genius. A suitable form would be Amerige, meaning Land of Amerigo, or America, since Europe and Asia have received women’s names.