There are many uses of “master” unrelated to the slaveowner meaning. It goes back to meaning a “teacher” or someone with authority. Words such as “magistrate” have the same root. It is also used to describe a tradesman who has achieved a certain level. Using it to describe a bedroom is not an allusion to slavery in any way. Even “slave” has diverged from original sense of enslaved humans.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/90678-REG/Medalight_PG20M_Master_Slave_120V.html
One where you can plausibly get around by walking, instead of needing to get in a car and drive every time you want a few groceries or to get lunch out or to do anything else not involving just being on your own property.
People living in much of the rest of the world may take this for granted, I don’t know; but there are a lot of residential areas in the USA that are set up so much for cars that it’s dangerous and/or impractical to get anywhere without one; or at least without taking motorized public transport, if there is any, which there may well not be.
ETA: It’s a pretty recent development in the USA to design for walkable neighborhoods, towns, communities; and a very different type of design than what was generally recommended during a lot of the 20th century. We are trying to do something about the resulting mess now; but because of the existing layout of roads and building lots and historical zoning it’s often not easy.
Thanks for the explanation, @thorny_locust. I had guessed at three plausible explanations but not that one, so there you go – unless one learns the coded lingo, there are at least four plausible interpretations of “walkable neighborhood”. So why not say, “walking distance to shops, restaurants, and theaters” or whatever is applicable, rather than making it sound like some kind of hiking trail, or a path that’s been leveled to the point that you can actually walk on it rather than having to take a funicular cable car up a mountainside? 
Did I mention that I HATE euphemisms?
It’s not a euphemism or coded lingo in American English. It’s an entirely standard phrase.
A 'walkable neighborhood" is a neighborhood where you can do a lot without a car. There’s a website that gives walk scores - my neighborhood is something like 90 ( out of 100). I can walk to stores, doctor’s offices, restaurants, bars, parks, schools, the post office, etc. You can not only live in my neighborhood without a car, but many of my neighbors don’t have a car or even a driver’s license because the public transportation is also good and within walking distance. My brother-in-law lives in a neighborhood with a walk score around 4 - you can’t walk anywhere except to a neighbor’s house.
That was exactly my reaction.
Yes, it’s a commonly used phrase. I’m not sure I would agree with “standard” since it is obviously subject to interpretation. Take this article, for instance – it seems to allude to some of the interpretations I mentioned. So I really would consider it a somewhat glib euphemism that is subject to differing interpretations about exactly what it means. Look at the first few sentences of the interpretation below. Is a neigborhood “walkable” just because you can walk to a public transit station, or to a streetcar or commuter train?
All I’m saying is that things are much clearer if you spell out what you mean instead of using glib phrases. And in the context of this thread, things are much clearer if you (the generic you) stop trying to re-invent the language by edict.
@doreen, thanks for your input on this, too. I get the general sense of what the phrase is supposed to mean but it definitely lacks precision. But we’re off on a sidetrack here now.
https://www.point2homes.com/news/us-real-estate-news/7-signs-of-a-walkable-neighborhood.html
ETA: Maybe we can put this digression to bed once and for all by suggesting that perhaps “walkable” in a practical sense means “you can comfortably live there without a car”, not necessarily that you can walk everywhere. That was true of my former place in the Big City, but is certainly not true here in the distant burbs where a car is essential.
So… That would be an argument against “master bedroom”. That doesn’t really mean anything. Or… It means the room the master of the house lives in, but hardly describes the room.
“Couples bedroom” or “large bedroom with attached bath” are both more explicit and more useful.
Just about everything in the English language is subject to interpretation. I don’t think that’s a reason to use paragraphs of explanation in a real estate listing. Potential buyers who want to know what precisely they can walk to will presumably either ask or go take a walk.
Walkable neighborhood is not the same as walking distance to shops. It’s not code, it’s actually a pretty precise term.
Back to the OP, I just want to point out that the reasons for changing this and other terms like it isn’t that it’s “offensive” or to cater to people who are easily offended. It’s because our culture is constructed, and one of the ways it’s constructed is through the language we use, and shared idioms and imagery. We don’t refer to a man as the master of the house anymore, and few people have servants. But we persist in an image or language of a house having a master. Changing paradigms involves changing language. If I choose to change what I call that bedroom, it’s not because of offensiveness, it’s because I see no reason to keep propping up that paradigm.
I actually think threads like this point the arrow of who’s offended the wrong way. Using the N-word is offensive. Using “master bedroom” is outdated. Some people seem to get all emotional and offended when others choose to update their language.
As other posters and sources have pointed out, “walkability” isn’t just about distance; it’s about other factors such as the presence of sidewalks as opposed to having to walk in streets, intermodal connections between walking routes and cycle/public transit options, and so on.
Exactly. I’m old enough to remember back when the self-described “anti-PC” grumps were moaning about the supposed tyranny of efforts to promote gender-neutral alternatives to words like “mailman” and “policeman”. Now that everybody’s had time to get used to the fact that a lot of mail carriers and police officers aren’t men, it seems perfectly natural to use the terms “mail carriers” and “police officers”, and the grumps have had to move on to finding other instances of linguistic evolution to moan about.
Only an idiot would think so
Well, it’s a “precise term” whose meaning I genuinely did not know. Given all the news about high crime areas in American cities, I really thought it might be a reference to a family-friendly low-crime area. But I find, on looking into it, that it’s a commonly used term not just in the US but quite widely. So I concede the point. That its meaning was unclear to me is on me.
I agree, but if you look at examples like the ones @Kimstu cited, of “mailman” and “policeman” and such, these terms didn’t change because of some misguided authority trying to drive the culture, but as a reflection of an actual changed reality – that of women in the workplace. I like browsing old magazines from the 20s and 30s and among the vast cultural differences that stand out to me is the incessant references to “men” in any context of career. This persisted as late as around the 60s, and was certainly still very deeply entrenched in the 50s. But eventually it became rather silly to speak of the “mail man” when said “man” was actually a woman. So the language had to change.
My issue with the scorn for “master bedroom” is that although some aspects of family have changed – the “head of the house” is not necessarily the man, and in a single-parent or SSM household the “man” might not even exist – the concept of parenting has not. This is still the room occupied by those who own the house, pay the bills, and feed the kids, and everyone has understood what “master bedroom” means for about a hundred years.
I admit that I’m a language conservative. I don’t like seeing familiar terms changed for no good reason, or fanciful new ones invented for equally specious reasons. Language changes that follow naturally from cultural changes make sense. That’s hugely different from linguistic activism, which may be well-intentioned but whose results are often comical, like the Berkeley town council’s edict renaming manhole covers to “maintenance covers”, as if that’s going to improve anyone’s life, or do anything at all other than confuse the reader.
I’m curious about whether our ages are very different, because I remember the shift in these terms being an ongoing struggle later than you suggest here, and that it was met with exactly this sort of reaction, with “what’s next…”* lists, and justifications. Everyone didn’t, in my experience, just agree that it was silly to keep saying mailman. And getting people to stop thinking of police officers as policemen is part of how women got accepted as police officers.
ETA: I’m a parent, owner of a house, and live in the biggest bedroom. I don’t consider myself the “master” of the house. It’s really very outdated.
*People thought “personhole cover” was a really clever one.
Not a parent, am an owner of an apartment and sleep in the largest bedroom. Marked as “Parents” or “parents’ sleeping room” (Eltern or Elternschlafzimmer) on building plans here in Switzerland. And I just checked a nearby new build, and they still use “Eltern” for the largest bedroom.
The other bedrooms/offices are just labeled with numbers, Room 1, Room 2, etc. As bedrooms do not have built-in closets, there is no difference between an room designated as an office or a bedroom.
Despite German being a gendered language, a maintenance hole cover is called a shaft lid (“Schachtdeckel”. Because it’s about what it is, not who might use it.
And if you were just learning the language, what comes to mind if you hear “manhole cover” if you have no idea that a “manhole” is a maintenance hole.
I don’t think “master bedroom” is offensive but I’m not really sure what the fuss is all about - some real estate board is not going to use the term and the non-use might spread?
Sure, the concept of parenting hasn’t changed - but the composition of households has. My son lived in a 4 bedroom house with three friends - who gets the “master bedroom”? I don’t know - but I will tell you I’ve never heard anyone in that situation refer to the “master bedroom”. It’s always the bigger/larger bedroom as in " My rent is $X more because I have the bigger bedroom. I know a number of 50-ish people who live with their 80ish parent* - the parent owns the house and the adult child pays the bills. Again, who gets the “master bedroom” ?
Primary/secondary. Manager/member. Controller/agent. Client/server. Main/backup.
Authority/replica. These are all possibilities and they’re already in use.
This is trivially easy if you have any kind of imagination at all. Of course it does entail recognizing that some terminology is dated and offensive, and it also entails tolerating a laughably tiny inconvenience to alleviate the concerns of others.
Yeah, for @Brayne_Dad, there’s a whole list here:
I had never really given much thought to “master/slave” terminology, but now that I have, I do have to say, it is at least slightly odd to me. I’ve dealt with master and slave flashes on multiflash lighting set-ups all the time, and if I knew no terms to start with and you asked me to name the roles of the system flashes, I doubt master-slave would even come in my initial brainstorm of terminology for me. I’d probably go something with like controller/responder, main/secondary, sender/receiver (which is what Canon went with), etc.
And as a result of quite a few language activists pointing this out, repeatedly, in a whole lot of places that were using those terms.
When our town zoning code was re-written in the 1990’s (note: not the 60’s, it didn’t even exist then), it would not have been so changed except for one such activist, who was me. On the most recent rewriting which we just went through, I was still finding occasional instances that had been missed; but at least this time, unlike in the '90’s, I didn’t have to argue over every such change.
There are a whole lot of houses occupied by people whose households aren’t structured that way. It’s been pointed out repeatedly in this thread that there are people who live alone, people who live only with other adults, people who live in families with both adults and children but with multiple adults who share paying the bills and feeding the kids. I’m having trouble finding this precise statistic, but at least in the USA it seems pretty definite that households made up of either one adult or a bedroom-sharing couple, with minor children, and with no additional adults in the house sharing responsibilities, are a minority.
Yeah. We’ve got that terminology in the first place as an analogy to human masters and slaves. If slavery hadn’t existed, we’d have used some other terms, because we wouldn’t have had the word ‘slave’ to begin with.
I should point out a few things, in all fairness. If you read my statement in context, I was saying that the 60s was more or less the time when we started transitioning from the stay-at-home Mom of the 50s (as per Father Knows Best and all the other sitcoms of the day) to the career woman of later decades. That you were lobbying for language changes in the 90s and beyond just seems to underscore my point that language changes most often do follow changes in culture, rather than the other way around.
In reality, things are not always so simple and clear-cut. The world is a complicated place, and sometimes it does work both ways, with language changes endorsed by official bodies helping to reinforce desirable cultural changes. But I’m skeptical about how often such edicts actually drive cultural changes, as opposed to merely creating unintentional humour.
I don’t know what the overall stats are, either, but it will likely vary a great deal with type of housing. There are probably far fewer kids in apartments and condos than in detached houses. Do they even have “master bedrooms” in apartments? (Maybe, I don’t know.) I can say that in the suburbs where I live, almost every single nearby neighbour is a couple with minor children, the only notable exception being … me. Far from being a “minority”, this family structure is practically universal here. And since these are the sorts of folks who tend to be upwardly mobile, the burbs tend to be where lots of real estate turnover happens, with real estate agents prowling like vultures.
Anyway, we have strayed quite far from the original topic. Sometimes language changes are desirable and productive, and sometimes they’re just stupid. The OP was just to express my humble opinion that this was one of the stupid ones.