That goes to @Spice_Weasel 's point. I live in an area with a very large Hispanic population. The only people I have heard use Latinx are academics and activists (or both).
It is fascinating. I don’t think it has to be racist itself to fall out of favor. I think we’ve reached a point in society in which anything related even in the most tangential way to slavery or racism offends some people to the degree that many people are going to avoid using that language.
Now I’m wondering if “piece of cake” is tied up in there somewhere. But I don’t think many people think about it, if it is.
They are, and I think they are still hanging around because people don’t know how they originated.
Says it originated in the Royal Air Force in the 1930s.
Says its believed to be related to “cakewalk”.
< shrug >
There’s your problem then…
Famous (still) because the dog is featured quite prominently in the fabulous 1955 film about the Dambusters mission. It was still broadcast as is on TV at least until the 1980s, and possibly still is, I think there has been some controversy about whether it should be cut.
I worry about this for the same reason that I don’t like referring to people as “slaves”: it can lead to thinking that enslavement was the only part of a person’s life worth considering. Enslavement was horrific, AND the people who were enslaved managed to practice agency and live the best lives they could under their circumstances, full of creativity and love and planning and humor, as well as anger and sorrow and misery and everything else that makes the human experience.
If we avoid any reference to any cultural tradition that arose during periods of enslavement, I worry that we are avoiding the full lives of the people who were enslaved.
I concur about “cake walks”. But our term " Wow, that job was a real cake walk", seems to originate from a carnival game, more or less Musical chairs, which was a very easy game to play.
We also maybe get “takes the cake” from that.
The origin of the term, as used for a task that was easy, is uncertain and shrouded in folk entomology, etc.
Seems to be possibly related to the game.
Yeah, "bury the hatchet and smoke a peace pipe"are not so bad. They honor a Native tradition, not trivialize it. Hell, many of our states have Native American words are names, do we get rid of those too?
From what I’ve seen from my West Coast friends who operate on “LA time”, that isn’t surprising. 
I find it interesting that American military helicopters are often named after Native American tribes, people, or terms ( Bell H-13 Sioux, UH-1 Iroquois (AKA “Huey”), CH-47 Chinook, OH-58 Kiowa, OH-58D Kiowa Warrior, AH-56 Cheyenne, UH-60A Black Hawk, AH-64 Apache, etc) and frequently organized into “air cavalry” units.
The Army decided as a policy to give all their helo models names taken from US Indian tribes. This dates from the beginning of helo aviation immediately after WWII and continues to the present day. I don’t know if that will continue for the next helo- or helo-like air machines the Army is now busy doing R&D & contracting for.
I had not until now noticed the irony of them often being assigned to air cavalry units. But once seen, it cannot be unseen.
I suspect the original motivation was to honor the tribes, much like they honored the Navajo code talkers. Nowadays that notion sounds pretty tin-eared.
I had a quick look to try to find out if anyone had expressed any ill feeling over this, and so far found instead the following, albeit from an army puff piece:
in 2012, Lakota elders bestowed ritualistic blessings on two South Dakota Army National Guard UH-72A Lakotas
And the article mentions that the Sioux (the original eponym) famously beat the 7th Cav at Little Bighorn, so perhaps any irony about the helos being in the Air Cav works both ways.
I wonder if there are any current Native American pilots? An Apache flying an Apache would be awesome.
Back in Vietnam, when the Army started experimenting with massed helicopter assaults as a viable tactic, they converted a number of former horse cavalry units to air cavalry. One of the most famous being Custer’s 7th Cavalry Regiment which participated in the battle of Ia Drang and portrayed in the film We Were Soldiers.
What I also find interesting (if also perhaps a bit tin-eared) is how many of these units maintain some of the uniform, markings, and traditions from the earlier Indian Wars era cavalry units. IOW, Col Kilgore prancing around the battlefield in Apocalypses Now wearing an olde timey cavalry officers hat and scarf wasn’t a weird affectation. Apparently it was standard issue circa Vietnam War.
I guess it’s similar to how some units also continued to maintain Confederate symbiology until relatively recently. On the one hand it probably comes from a place of maintaining traditions for some disagreement we fought over 150 years ago. Unfortunately it sort of glosses over what that disagreement was actually about.
I don’t think so, around here. Around here the term means a spell of warm weather that occurs after the first frost. The first frost runs later than it used to, and the warm spell tends to be warmer, but otherwise the pattern still occurs, in most but not all years as it did before; and it affects what people can do outside, so it’s still useful to have a term for it.
Maybe that’s why I sometimes still do hear it around here, though. I don’t know what the opinion of the Haudenosaunee is of its use. Maybe I should try to find out.
I don’t think it does. Maybe it will in a couple of hundred years – though there are still people being enslaved right now. But I think the words are too close, and the wound still too raw, and the people affected in their fairly recent family history too many.
And also, the “master/slave” terminology gets used, or used to get used, for all sorts of things; not just software. I think the “crippled software” use may be for that field, and not commonly run into outside it. I’ve never heard somebody refer to a crippled car part, or tractor part, or hand tool, or garden hose valve. And outside this board I don’t all that often hear people talk about software, except occasionally in the sense of complaining that it’s not working right, and they use laymen’s terms to do so; I don’t think I’ve heard anybody say “crippled”.
(I will now wait for multiple people to tell me they hear it all the time in multiple contexts; or used to until recently.)
Insightful and very well said.
I suppose it’s a good thing that our enemies don’t stay enemies forever. The Native American Indians, the Confederate states, the Germans, the Vietnamese; all those are now on our friend list, at least officially.
I imagine eventually we’ll get the Russians and the Chinese on the friend list too, but only after the prerequisite war has been fought.
The second U.S. civil war, you mean?
Once it’s over we’ll probably determine they were the cause of that war, but I doubt they’ll get the friend credit for it afterwards. Gotta have [whoever] as the direct straight-up enemy for them to get friend credit in the next episode.
I may not necessarily feel the same way about these terms, but I totally appreciate that you put this down in words like this so that many people (including myself) will think twice before using words that have widely varying degrees of impact between individuals.
Next time I am using these as technical terminology, I will likely make an effort to avoid “master/slave”.
It’s more of a idea of maintaining continuity, tradition, and martial pride. It gets particularly weird for units that are state militia (i.e. National Guard) or Indian War units (mostly Cavalry units), because those units in many cases have unbroken continuity from before and after those particular battles.
I kind of think the idea is less what side they fought on, but rather did the unit itself fight well, and uphold the honor of the unit. In other words, it’s more important for military purposes that the 1st Texas Regiment fought hard and didn’t retreat at the Alamo, Chickamauga, Gettysburg, Antietam, Naples, San Pietro Infine, and in Iraq, than it is whether they were fighting Mexico, the Federal government, Nazi Germany or insurgents in Iraq.
Same thing with “Indian Standard Time.” Punctuality is not a common feature of society in India.
There’s also the LJB, or Long Jewish Goodbye, that can take more than an hour. Contrast that to an Irish goodbye, which is leaving without anyone knowing you’ve left. I honestly don’t know if either of them are racist, or even demeaning, but they exist.