I’m writing what is in effect a 3D math library. In linear algebra, there’s a notion of a “homogeneous” vector or matrix, where in a nutshell (and for reasons I won’t go into) the space is treated as if it were one dimension bigger than it really is.
So I have functions to generate a plain rotation matrix, and a homogeneous one. Since, “homogeneous” is a bit tedious to write out every time you want to call the function, I was going to shorten it to “homo” and prefix the homogeneous functions with it. I ended up erring on the side of “homog” for now, not because I think it’s offensive, I think context is important. I’m just worried somebody will make a huge issue where there is none. My friend said he’d be unable to take the library seriously if a function had a “Homo” prefix which I found a little juvenile to be honest.
But what say the Dope? Would “homo” be fine in this, or a similar context (i.e. Chemistry), or is “homo” completely poisoned as a slur against homosexuals by now? We’ll ignore “Homo Sapiens” (Erectus, Habilus, etc) since there’s no real way of getting around that one – especially since it’s not really an “abbreviation”.
If you’re a bro, it’s okay to say “You kinda have nice eyes. No homo.” The offense does not lie in the term, the offensive part is being a bro in the first place.
If you say “ecce homo,” you’re having a religious experience, not waxing Nixonian about those “icky homos.” And of course, that means man in Latin, whereas homo(sexual) means same in Greek.
All I know is that if I try to imagine what you’re imagining, I start seeing flashes of Slug Signorino art and reflexively turn off the image before it develops fully.
Seems fine to me. As long as no one is going to have to explain the code to a classroom full of High School students, I can’t see where it’d be a problem.
(Maybe its just because I don’t hang around with 12-year-olds anymore, but using “homo” as a pejorative seems kinda passe: like “rad” or “groovy”. I have a vague impression slang has moved on to new and exciting words to question others masculinity.)
In my teen years, I had a friend that worked at a Dunkin Donuts. The milk cooler had whole milk labeled as “homo milk”. One particular day I was visiting him, I noticed that shelf was empty.
After some careful thought, I turned to my friend and, in the presence of customers, loudly informed him that “There no mo’ homo milk, mofo!”
This seems like a necessary comic to go with this statement:
I don’t know, this whole “no homo” thing seems to be pretty popular with the college kids right now. I’m not sure in that phrase it’s quiiiiiite pejorative, but I wouldn’t call it a dead word.
I’m not writing a technical document, I’m writing a library, which is a set of programming functions. In the documentation (comments) for the program “homogeneous” is written out every time just fine. Abbreviations are common in programming libraries because programmers often need to call the same function many, many times within a single program and would like to save on keystrokes. In fact, most 3D math libraries I’ve seen don’t even bother to spell out “Vector” and “Matrix” like I did, most just opt for “vec” and “mat”, so mine is already more longwinded than most.
