I didn’t want to hijack the Welsh thread, and in it, they mention that being gypped is a slight against gypsies.
It got me thinking that there are idioms that are racist that may not be obvious (at least to me, without consideration)
In both IT and Automotive industries, Master and Slave are being deprecated (master and slave cylinders in cars, Master and Slave controllers, servers, etc in IT)
And in describing how downtown Denver has changed since Covid, I was about to describe to a coworker how I didn’t care for the ‘local color’…intending it to mean the indigent/homeless/drug addicted there…and caught myself because…well…that sounds pretty racist.
So what other idioms are you encountering that probably won’t survive going forward?
You see this a lot in real estate too. Where “master bedroom / bath” has been replaced with “primary”.
I can see not using terms like “gypped”, “welched”, or “piker” as they originate from slights against particular groups of people. I’m not really clear why the sudden push to eliminate “master” and “slave” from the vocabulary. Those terms are not specifically racist as slavery existed long before the discovery of America. Seems stupid to me.
I’m not sure about that one… “Local color” sounds to me to be fairly close in meaning to “local flavor”, and I’m certainly not tasting the skin of any of the people who contribute to the “flavor”.
Then again, I’d mostly use “local color” to refer to things that were positive, or at worst just weird. I don’t think I’d ever refer to the local homeless population as being part of the “local color”.
I think I’ve heard people use the expression local color in a euphemistic/ironic way to refer to “undesirable” aspects of an area - homeless people, drug users, even ostentatious Trump supporters.
And while the expression does not originally refer to literal color, and certainly not skin color, I could imagine it being used by a racist as an unsubtle dog whistle to allude to the fact that there are “undesirable” non-White people in an area. There’s the risk of that interpretation, even if unintended.
The widespread general association of darkness with bad things and light with good things is unfortunate when it comes to racial connotations. The original association is not arbitrary - presumably it derives from night and darkness potentially harboring unknown dangers, and the association of light with safety and warmth. But it’s telling that the polarized words black and white were adopted for skin color, when actual skin color is nowhere near those extremes. Calling @MrDibble - I recall that he commented on this in the thread discussing capitalization of Black and White.
It doesn’t have to be racism that makes the terms distasteful, it can simply be the violence, and master/slave is inherently a violent relationship. For other examples in the computing space, compare the terms kill -9, force quit, and end task.
Powwow is on the way out. Indian Giver isn’t something I’ve heard in decades. It’s beyond disgusting and would have resulted in gasps nearly as bad as n-word if someone uttered it when I was in college.
Enough Native Americans find its usage for a regular work meeting or whatever problematic that I don’t use it that way because I don’t want to be a dick.
Right, but like I said, the Natives still use it for their own ceremony. So, we maybe should not use it for a work meeting, but it is still in use for the Natives. “Powwow” is a term best used only in proper context.
There has been a widespread shift away from using potentially dehumanizing/depersonalizing derived nouns toward the use of adjective+person constructions, and most recently (in some cases) to prefer “person first” terminology, e.g.
the disabled → disabled people → people with disabilities