4 ms·

I wish they had called it something else. I hate to be that guy but you know, it's not that hard to be maybe just a little bit more thoughtful. https://www.bbc

by kotxig 4y ago

I wish they had called it something else. I hate to be that guy but you know, it's not that hard to be maybe just a little bit more thoughtful. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17997413 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17997413

Quarrelsome 4y ago
Is it still that offensive? The linked article discusses a peak of the term around reform of 19th century "lunatic asylums" where the phrase was in common use and had dark connotations but aren't all those people dead now? Is the term still somehow problematic and if it is, doesn't that imply that words like "insane" have the same problem?
- jamil7 4y ago
  It's not offensive as much as it's kind of odd sounding, and would feel awkward pitching to someone else.
- kotxig 4y ago
  I mean, I had to think about it. Whether it's hugely offensive or not isn't necessarily the right question here. With the whole English language to pick from there are probably better choices that are less ambiguous.
  - Quarrelsome 4y ago
    I personally worry somewhat about social-censure. Here's [1] a talk that asks (among other things) if Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses would be published or even written today and I think that concern relates a little to our conversation. While its quite easy to see the argument for self/social censure (as usually someone is personally motivated to make it), I worry that the argument against it is much harder to see and has less organic advocates. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dhrlhm/the-reith-lectures-2022-the-four-freedoms-1-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-freedom-of-speech https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dhrlhm/the-reith-lec...
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > Whether it's hugely offensive or not isn't necessarily the right question here. It is the right question. If a term once considered offensive no longer is one, and there's no one who gets offended by it, is it still offensive? > With the whole English language to pick from there are probably better choices that are less ambiguous. Given infinite time and finite language, every term will become offensive. What then? Especially considering the euphemism treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan
    - toqy 4y ago
      Luckily most projects won't be around for infinite time
- pessimizer 4y ago
  As far as I can tell, it's not offensive, and was never offensive. What can be offensive is using it as a term to refer to the mentally ill, especially in law - and it's really more antiquated than offensive even there. We have more specific and thoughtful terminology for varieties of mental illnesses now, that have nothing to do with the moon. So if you have a law on the books governing how to treat lunatics, or how lunatics should be treated, it's a dumb old law because there's no official test for lunatic. It would be just as stupid if you had laws about the "wacky" or the "nuts." The overwrought nature of the concern about seeing the word as the name of a piece of software is just a symptom of the current zeitgeist.
danpalmer 4y ago
Agreed. While it might be debatable whether it's explicitly offensive, it's at least a bit of a grey area and it immediately stood out to me as a poor choice of name. Whether you agree or not with the use of the term, names are part of communication, and communication that people are going to take issue with (rightly or wrongly) is going to have an impact on a product/project/business, and should probably be reconsidered, unless the point is to cause controversy or dogwhistle certain values. This name for example would probably rule out use at many companies, and I suspect many would choose not to publicise it with things like conference talks.
- lolinder 4y ago
  The problem is that in the age of the internet, it's very difficult to find anything that someone, somewhere won't be offended by. Every time an organization or project gives in and alters its innocently-chosen name because a tiny minority takes offense, they further normalize outrageous outrage. It's definitely a fine line to walk. There are names that originated in an offensive context, and it's easier for me to see the objection to those. But "lunatic" hasn't been commonly used in its offensive sense in nearly a century, so I don't think it's fair to stoke outrage towards a project that started in the 2020s and chose it for extremely innocent reasons.
  - kotxig 4y ago
    "should probably be reconsidered" isn't exactly outrage is it? We can have sensible discussions about appropriate naming without being extreme one way or the other, as much as the internet seems to hate moderate discussion.
  - danpalmer 4y ago
    > it's very difficult to find anything that someone, somewhere won't be offended by Sure, but there's a big difference to the marketability of a product between whether 30% get a funny feeling that it's not a great name and won't promote via word of mouth, vs 0.0001% who are known for taking issue with a lot of stuff shouting about it in their echochamber. > But "lunatic" hasn't been commonly used in its offensive sense in nearly a century I think it was reasonable to refer to "lunatic asylums" or even "looney bins" until quite recently. The offensiveness may be less, and less targeted at individuals than it was 100 years ago, but it's still there.
elteto 4y ago
It is not used in a context in which it is offensive. It’s just a name. Maybe they just like looking at the moon a lot.
- sli 4y ago
  This logic implies that one could name a project after an explicit slur and it being a project instead of a directed insult makes it no longer a slur. That doesn't track at all.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    It does. A few years back a non-native English speaker presented an Erlang library called `coon` because he like this abbreviation of the word `raccoon`. [1] The shitstorm from Americans (US and Canada) was unbelievable. Even though: - most people on the mailing list where this was discussed never heard it used as a slur - people in the states where this word was purportedly still used as a slur never heard it used - several black people (both African Americans IIRC and a guy from South Africa) said they had no problems with the name (and promptly ignored) The name of the library was changed. Now. The question is: who decides it is a slur especially in our global world? Somehow, increasingly, it's the white Americans who end up being offended on everyone's behalf. See also: the performative activism around master/main branches in git. [1] Actual reasons: the name was available: https://github.com/comtihon/enot/issues/59#issuecomment-365183267 https://github.com/comtihon/enot/issues/59#issuecomment-3651...
    - felixgallo 4y ago
      man, don't be ridiculous. 'coon' is objectively a long standing racist slur. That some people ("a guy from South Africa", ffs) claimed not to know this or notto have heard it personally doesn't make that untrue. I invite you to go to any black neighborhood in the US and chant 'coon' for as long as you can to determine just how performative the white americans are being. I'll take the short side of 30 seconds.
      - 4y ago
bheadmaster 4y ago
Everything is "offensive" these days - anyone can claim anything is "offensive", and because it's subjective, it's impossible to even be proven wrong. The very word has lost all real meaning.
- kotxig 4y ago
  definition of "lunatic" - "a person who is mentally ill (not in technical use)." I didn't say it was offensive. If it was called "autistic", the word is not offensive but... why? It's just a really strange choice.
  - bheadmaster 4y ago
    > why? It's just a really strange choice. I personally thought it was a witty name. Had a tiny mental chuckle when I read it. Better question is, why not? If it's not offensive, then what is the reason you "wish they had called it something else"? > It's just a really strange choice Doesn't sound like a real criticism to me...
    - kotxig 4y ago
      Let's just put it this way, I'm not advertising in anything associated with my professional credibility that I use "lunatic", for the very obvious reason that it's possibly offensive to some people and that the word offers nothing to convey meaning. I don't have to find it personally offensive to not want to associate with it.
      - thingification 4y ago
        I can understand that as a heuristic. On the other hand, there are other people who might apply a different heuristic and guess that a project named 'lunatic' is less likely to attract the sort of people who might take, for example, a code of conduct as a tool to beat other contributors about the head. (I'm not saying that's you!) I guess there are "swings and roundabouts" and peoples' rules of thumb differ, which is perhaps diversity that's all to the good.
eigenrick 4y ago
The origin of the name comes from the fact that it started as a Lua project. In Lua (Portuguese for moon), everyone loves any "moon" related names or puns for their project. As such, "Lunatic" fits right in. As someone who has family members with mental health issues, I don't find the term offensive at all. I, for one, by default think more of someone who's obsessed with the moon, I guess it's because I never read that article, so I've never been told to be offended by it. All that said, I do hope that the authors understand that they might be fighting an uphill battle with regards to adoption.
lolinder 4y ago
The article you link to discusses "lunatic" being offensive when used in law in its original sense to refer to real people with real mental health problems. Whether that is offensive (and I think it probably is) is a completely different question from whether its modern, colloquial use is offensive. The word dramatically declined in popularity through the 19th century but started climbing again after ~1995[0]. The recent increase in usage is driven entirely by a much milder, colloquial meaning of "wildly foolish"[1]. I think being offended because our great-grandparents used the word literally is a bit silly. [0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=lunatic&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=lunatic&year_s... [1] Meriam Webster identifies the older meaning as "dated": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lunatic https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lunatic

by kotxig 4y ago

Quarrelsome 4y ago

Is it still that offensive? The linked article discusses a peak of the term around reform of 19th century "lunatic asylums" where the phrase was in common use and had dark connotations but aren't all those people dead now? Is the term still somehow problematic and if it is, doesn't that imply that words like "insane" have the same problem?

jamil7 4y ago
It's not offensive as much as it's kind of odd sounding, and would feel awkward pitching to someone else.
kotxig 4y ago
I mean, I had to think about it. Whether it's hugely offensive or not isn't necessarily the right question here. With the whole English language to pick from there are probably better choices that are less ambiguous.
- Quarrelsome 4y ago
  I personally worry somewhat about social-censure. Here's [1] a talk that asks (among other things) if Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses would be published or even written today and I think that concern relates a little to our conversation. While its quite easy to see the argument for self/social censure (as usually someone is personally motivated to make it), I worry that the argument against it is much harder to see and has less organic advocates. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dhrlhm/the-reith-lectures-2022-the-four-freedoms-1-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-freedom-of-speech https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dhrlhm/the-reith-lec...
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > Whether it's hugely offensive or not isn't necessarily the right question here. It is the right question. If a term once considered offensive no longer is one, and there's no one who gets offended by it, is it still offensive? > With the whole English language to pick from there are probably better choices that are less ambiguous. Given infinite time and finite language, every term will become offensive. What then? Especially considering the euphemism treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan
  - toqy 4y ago
    Luckily most projects won't be around for infinite time
pessimizer 4y ago
As far as I can tell, it's not offensive, and was never offensive. What can be offensive is using it as a term to refer to the mentally ill, especially in law - and it's really more antiquated than offensive even there. We have more specific and thoughtful terminology for varieties of mental illnesses now, that have nothing to do with the moon. So if you have a law on the books governing how to treat lunatics, or how lunatics should be treated, it's a dumb old law because there's no official test for lunatic. It would be just as stupid if you had laws about the "wacky" or the "nuts." The overwrought nature of the concern about seeing the word as the name of a piece of software is just a symptom of the current zeitgeist.

danpalmer 4y ago

Agreed. While it might be debatable whether it's explicitly offensive, it's at least a bit of a grey area and it immediately stood out to me as a poor choice of name. Whether you agree or not with the use of the term, names are part of communication, and communication that people are going to take issue with (rightly or wrongly) is going to have an impact on a product/project/business, and should probably be reconsidered, unless the point is to cause controversy or dogwhistle certain values. This name for example would probably rule out use at many companies, and I suspect many would choose not to publicise it with things like conference talks.

lolinder 4y ago
The problem is that in the age of the internet, it's very difficult to find anything that someone, somewhere won't be offended by. Every time an organization or project gives in and alters its innocently-chosen name because a tiny minority takes offense, they further normalize outrageous outrage. It's definitely a fine line to walk. There are names that originated in an offensive context, and it's easier for me to see the objection to those. But "lunatic" hasn't been commonly used in its offensive sense in nearly a century, so I don't think it's fair to stoke outrage towards a project that started in the 2020s and chose it for extremely innocent reasons.
- kotxig 4y ago
  "should probably be reconsidered" isn't exactly outrage is it? We can have sensible discussions about appropriate naming without being extreme one way or the other, as much as the internet seems to hate moderate discussion.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  > it's very difficult to find anything that someone, somewhere won't be offended by Sure, but there's a big difference to the marketability of a product between whether 30% get a funny feeling that it's not a great name and won't promote via word of mouth, vs 0.0001% who are known for taking issue with a lot of stuff shouting about it in their echochamber. > But "lunatic" hasn't been commonly used in its offensive sense in nearly a century I think it was reasonable to refer to "lunatic asylums" or even "looney bins" until quite recently. The offensiveness may be less, and less targeted at individuals than it was 100 years ago, but it's still there.

elteto 4y ago

It is not used in a context in which it is offensive. It’s just a name. Maybe they just like looking at the moon a lot.

sli 4y ago
This logic implies that one could name a project after an explicit slur and it being a project instead of a directed insult makes it no longer a slur. That doesn't track at all.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  It does. A few years back a non-native English speaker presented an Erlang library called `coon` because he like this abbreviation of the word `raccoon`. [1] The shitstorm from Americans (US and Canada) was unbelievable. Even though: - most people on the mailing list where this was discussed never heard it used as a slur - people in the states where this word was purportedly still used as a slur never heard it used - several black people (both African Americans IIRC and a guy from South Africa) said they had no problems with the name (and promptly ignored) The name of the library was changed. Now. The question is: who decides it is a slur especially in our global world? Somehow, increasingly, it's the white Americans who end up being offended on everyone's behalf. See also: the performative activism around master/main branches in git. [1] Actual reasons: the name was available: https://github.com/comtihon/enot/issues/59#issuecomment-365183267 https://github.com/comtihon/enot/issues/59#issuecomment-3651...
  - felixgallo 4y ago
    man, don't be ridiculous. 'coon' is objectively a long standing racist slur. That some people ("a guy from South Africa", ffs) claimed not to know this or notto have heard it personally doesn't make that untrue. I invite you to go to any black neighborhood in the US and chant 'coon' for as long as you can to determine just how performative the white americans are being. I'll take the short side of 30 seconds.
    - 4y ago

bheadmaster 4y ago

Everything is "offensive" these days - anyone can claim anything is "offensive", and because it's subjective, it's impossible to even be proven wrong. The very word has lost all real meaning.

kotxig 4y ago
definition of "lunatic" - "a person who is mentally ill (not in technical use)." I didn't say it was offensive. If it was called "autistic", the word is not offensive but... why? It's just a really strange choice.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  > why? It's just a really strange choice. I personally thought it was a witty name. Had a tiny mental chuckle when I read it. Better question is, why not? If it's not offensive, then what is the reason you "wish they had called it something else"? > It's just a really strange choice Doesn't sound like a real criticism to me...
  - kotxig 4y ago
    Let's just put it this way, I'm not advertising in anything associated with my professional credibility that I use "lunatic", for the very obvious reason that it's possibly offensive to some people and that the word offers nothing to convey meaning. I don't have to find it personally offensive to not want to associate with it.
    - thingification 4y ago
      I can understand that as a heuristic. On the other hand, there are other people who might apply a different heuristic and guess that a project named 'lunatic' is less likely to attract the sort of people who might take, for example, a code of conduct as a tool to beat other contributors about the head. (I'm not saying that's you!) I guess there are "swings and roundabouts" and peoples' rules of thumb differ, which is perhaps diversity that's all to the good.

eigenrick 4y ago

The origin of the name comes from the fact that it started as a Lua project. In Lua (Portuguese for moon), everyone loves any "moon" related names or puns for their project. As such, "Lunatic" fits right in. As someone who has family members with mental health issues, I don't find the term offensive at all. I, for one, by default think more of someone who's obsessed with the moon, I guess it's because I never read that article, so I've never been told to be offended by it. All that said, I do hope that the authors understand that they might be fighting an uphill battle with regards to adoption.

lolinder 4y ago

The article you link to discusses "lunatic" being offensive when used in law in its original sense to refer to real people with real mental health problems. Whether that is offensive (and I think it probably is) is a completely different question from whether its modern, colloquial use is offensive. The word dramatically declined in popularity through the 19th century but started climbing again after ~1995[0]. The recent increase in usage is driven entirely by a much milder, colloquial meaning of "wildly foolish"[1]. I think being offended because our great-grandparents used the word literally is a bit silly. [0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=lunatic&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=lunatic&year_s... [1] Meriam Webster identifies the older meaning as "dated": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lunatic https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lunatic