On the Gripping hand, thankyouverymuch
I do , but I also understand the difference between a slave master and a master bedroom.
Master bedroom has nothingwhatsoever to do with slave masters. It is for the Husband and Wife as opposed to the kids rooms and the guest room.
The term originated with Sears in the late 1920s. No slaves then.
I do , but I also understand the difference between a slave master and a master bedroom.
Master bedroom has nothingwhatsoever to do with slave masters. It is for the Husband and Wife as opposed to the kids rooms and the guest room.
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It’s also the bedroom where the “Doberperson” dog sleeps.
Clearly, you don’t or you wouldn’t have attempted to draw a comparison.
Well, yeah, there were. Remember, the US isn’t the only country on this planet.
Besides, not only is it a loaded term regardless of when it was first used, if we started calling our attic “the Jew keeper” (because that’s where people keep their old costume jewelry, nothing to do with Jewish people), it would be wrong, even if Jewish people aren’t still hiding from Nazis.
Also (because someone else asked about it), the county of Los Angeles asked (not requested or forced or censored or cancelled anyone) that big tech companies look for alternatives to the Master/Slave drive terminology, nearly two decades ago. CNN.com - 'Master' and 'slave' computer labels unacceptable, officials say - Nov. 26, 2003
Unless of course they use the Chop Jewey font. Soy Vay!
Just in case it needs to be explained to anybody:
The calligraphy here is a parody of the standard Hebrew/Yiddish alphabet font.
There’s enough political incorrectness on that one jar of sauce to cause members of the Toronto Real Estate Board to clutch at their pearls and head either for the fainting couch or directly up to the Primary Bedroom with a major case of the vapours.
This. To me, master bedroom doesn’t have any connotations to slavery but it sounds very patriarchal. Like, the master bedroom is for the master of the house to sleep in because he is he economic provider and this justifies that he rules over his domestic domain and establishes the rules and order of the house.
It feels very 1950s, fresh martini at the door at 6pm, the man doesn’t have to do any of the housework and kids are spanked to keep them in line style suburban fantasy life that we are hopefully moving away from and towards a more egalitarian, democratic communal family structure and I don’t mind our wording reflecting that change.
Two things. First, this isn’t some private club that can feel free to engage in whatever language variations they feel like developing. This is a real estate board, which governs the buying and selling of houses and the language in which these properties are described. They are thus uniquely influential in changing the language for everyone in their particular subject domain.
Second, I don’t think I can, or should, “control” what they do in that respect. What I think, rather, is that when they’re being dumbasses, they should be called out for it.
I’ll bet it won’t be long, actually. As others noted, there’s already a push to remove master/slave terminology from the tech industry. Master/slave flash units are common in photography, but Canon and Nikon at least are switching names. So master/slave cylinders are likely going to be changed, too.
Obviously, it’s not likely that the average repair shop is going to switch over immediately. But automakers will eventually decide to rename the parts in their catalogs with something more neutral, and probably order the dealers to comply as well. Eventually the names will stick because it’ll be too much trouble to refer to the old names.
That’s an interesting take on it. But that is certainly not the way it was described on CBC News, presumably based on a press release from the Toronto Real Estate Board, which specifically referenced racism and slavery as the basis of the term’s alleged offensiveness. My main problem is this idiotic justification, and the rather terse announcement that the new usage is being mandated. If the real estate industry wants to gradually change their terminology, fine – that happens all the time. Much of it is stupid, but that’s the nature of marketing. But that is decidedly not how this new usage was described and rationalized.
I’ve heard similar objections about male/female connectors. Honestly, the mind boggles.
I can’t get too worked up about getting rid of “slave”. There are US citizens alive today whose parents were genuine Civil War era slaves. It’s not so long ago that it’s a completely abstract concept for all Americans.
Nor are those the only meanings of the word. Any kind of official mail that came directed specifically to me, rather than to my parents, was addressed to ‘master FirstName LastName’.
Since ‘master’ is the term used to indicate a male child, and we’re all adults here, maybe we could call it the Mister Bedroom
Did you mean Grandparents? I think an issue is still alive as long as grandparents were involved, but I’m having trouble with the idea that anyone now alive had more than one parent who was born a Civil War era sl–ve in the USA.
Sorry, I didn’t mean both parents, just that there is a non-zero set of people born slaves who have children still alive today. And really it would almost certainly be only fathers, given the ages involved. But someone who is 100 years old today could have a father born into slavery in 1860. Of course you’re right that grandparents “count” too; really there must be numerous people with a family member that they interacted with directly and had been a slave.
Neither will mine. My workshop is far too dusty and messy to be in the master bedroom.
Exactly and the major structural problem we have is that main bedrooms - that are larger and have extra facilities - even exist.
Even the term “main” (or “primary”) bedroom has a fascist feel to it given the obvious implications concerning those who are forced to sleep elsewhere. We could move to a purely descriptive term (“biggest”) but really all that’s doing is highlighting that the language isn’t the problem.
It’s the very architecture of the modern house that is an oppressive and ever present reminder of the jackboot heels of the parent-iarchy keeping us down.
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic with this or not but I wanted to write about this but ultimately decided to leave it out.
Beyond just the nomenclature, I do agree with you that the modern American house design bakes in an associate between space and status that feels problematic in many different contexts but especially in the context of family. Often, the master bedroom isn’t just bigger but also is built with more luxurious furnishings and higher end features under the assumption that the master of the house “deserves” to be living in nicer circumstances than the other members and that houses serve to reinforce hierarchy for the nuclear, atomic family that lives in them.
The childhood home I grew up with had 4 bedrooms of varying sizes which lead to my parents having to pick which of the children “deserved” the bigger bedroom and what that meant for the social dynamics among the children. There was no reason why the floorplan could not have been adjusted so that all 3 non-primary rooms were approximately the same size and there was no reason why one child intrinsically needed any more room than another child but the choice was forced on us that one child got the “better” bedroom and another got the “worst” one.
Later, living with roommates, it was always the awkward negotiation of who got the master bedroom, mainly because none of us really wanted it and we had to figure out who had to pay how much extra rent for the extra space that they didn’t really care about, because houses are built for nuclear families and not co-equal roommates.
In the workplace as well, people who are higher status are given an office with a door that closes and lower status people work in an open floor plan. As a manager, I’ve always thought this was exceedingly ridiculous as being in an office hindered my work vs sitting in the same pod as my team. There was one job I had where one team member regularly had to make phone calls so I switched desks with them and I was sitting with the rest of my team while that team member got the office and… people started losing their minds. The team member actually privately asked me to switch back with them because of the amount of flak they were getting from people in completely unrelated parts of the company. We ended up compromising of nobody inhabiting the office full time and having people pop in there when they needed to make a phone call but it was interesting to me just how much you couldn’t give people space due to need, you could only hand out space due to status.
Obviously, different people will have different needs for space dependant on circumstance, two people living in the same room should probably have a bigger room than solo people, but I see no reason why houses couldn’t be built with a mix of Large rooms (designed for 2 people to live in them), Medium rooms (designed for one person) and Small rooms (for hobby rooms or guest bedrooms) and for each to be a roughly standardized size.
You might have families today which comprise of, say, a divorced dad living with an adult child and their spouse who are economically unable to afford to move out, living in a 2BR house. The dad is occupying the master bedroom because he is the economic provider in the house while the child is crammed into the smaller room with their spouse because that’s how status embeds itself. If you renamed the rooms to the Large room and the Medium room, perhaps the family could see it makes more logical sense for the child and spouse to occupy the large room and that the parent only needs the medium room for his needs.
You could also support more varied family structures like intergenerational families that might need multiple large rooms or renters that need many medium rooms only etc. and recognize that not everyone in America lives in atomic nuclear families, and they shouldn’t have to pretend like they do.
I’m not saying just changing a few words around is going to fix the world or anything, but it does help us notice embedded assumptions and ask us if we want to consciously choose them or whether we adopted them simply because that’s what our culture imprinted on us.
I thought that “jackboot heels of the parent-iarchy” might make it somewhat obvious.
My dad has a house that not only had a master bedroom/bathroom but also ‘servant’s quarters’. This is on the blueprints of a house built in the early 70’s.