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Pour one out for all the folks who tried to transition and ended up a transmission. Tough way to go.
I love my blue collar brother in law 🥰 he answers all my stupid questionsI remember forever ago on Reddit, someone would post in the trans sudreddit asking for help on a transmission issue and still getting helpful replies.
I still often say trans/tranny when referring to a transmission. It’s hard to train those language patterns out of yourself. Not to mention things like master and slave cylinders, hermophradite/mophradite calipers and fittings, gender changers.
Reamers and reaming, bastard files and bastard threads, deep hole drilling, male/female fittings, shafts and lube, prongs, orifice.
Open source has tried to redefine master/slave in things like SPI to controller and peripheral, ie. MOSI/COPI but the rest of the documentation and all of the documentation that came before it still uses it.
Technical language is full of this stuff and is often the clearest way to express something. It is the standard and changing industrial standards is very hard.
It’s funny, is changing this stuff performative or does it really matter?
I would say it matters. However, it is likely that new terms being created today will become offensive in the future.
I could see Big Endian and Little Endian becoming offensive if it isn’t already considered offensive.
Allowlist/Blocklist vs whitelist/blacklist in software.
A lot of product changed the terms on the front end but the backend still uses it, and our internal tools mostly use it.
Big Endian/Little Endian is a reference to Gulliver’s Travels, where there was a society that argued whether to break hard boiled eggs on the little end or the big end. It is pretty much non offensive and would take a stretch to become offensive in the future.
It’s also a children’s song that I was taught as a child in kindergarten or maybe church. That’s what i associate it with.
What’s the issue with lube?
You tell someone to go lube the shaft in complete seriousness, and they’re going to giggle and pull a, “That’s what she said…”
Not a probelm, per se, but it is a good example of just how much of technical language can be perceived as a double entendre. I generally don’t realize I’ve said anything like that until a new kid starts snickering.
This is also part, not all, of the reason there is resistance to changing these things. A good chunk of that resistance is because those using these words have no bad intent whatsoever. It’s not even on the radar.
And of course, there are plenty of bigoted shitheads who don’t want to change.
I’m honest and not trying to be an ass, but what is the issue with double entendre? And how is it a hallmark of bigots to do so? Isn’t “that what she said” a ribbing on that weird boss from the Office?
Nothing is wrong with double entendres depending on intent. My humor and language is about as crass as it comes depending on my audience.
I’m saying that there are so many terms like this, gender and similar is built into english technical language.
Personal experience, hired a black woman when I was running a shop. Half the crew has the maturity and grace of drunk squirrels. I easily pass as het. I say something about a female thread being buggered. Now I’ve got two knuckleheads in the back giggling even though she gets that I was not being offensive. Still, that sucks for both of us and I want to slap the shit out of the knuckleheads and I feel like shit for causing it.
And we wonder why all minorities are so underrepresented in STEM. It’s a minefield.
In my perfect little world, we don’t change the terms and instead reduce the dumbass level. In reality, we navigate the minefield as best we can and change the things that cause the most offense.
I feel like “that’s what she said” is older than the office, though that definitely (re)popularized it.
The office (US) came out in 2005, and I’m pretty sure I’d been hearing it before then. I could be wrong though, as that was twenty years ago.
Yeah I think part of the joke was Michael had latched on to an existing joke and kept using it in a setting where it wasn’t appropriate, especially since he was the manager.
Prior to the office, it was used in Wayne’s world gags on SNL (late 80s), and Johnny Carson used it before that (70s and 80s).
Apparently it originated from a British version, “said the actress to the bishop” that was used back in the early 1900s in music hall comedy and army banter.
Though the real joke is pointing out sexual innuendo and double meanings (both intentional and unintentional), which goes back at least as far as Shakespeare but is probably older than recorded history.
Oh yeah, my friends group and I were hitting “that’s what (s)he said” pretty hard in the nineties.
Nothing, nor is there any issue with big / little endian, no relation to “Indian”, which is a different word with a different pronunciation.
Some of those things do matter, like “black / white” meaning “bad / good” as it affects the way we think about those colours, and “master / slave” is dependent on context.
I’m a big fan of Humble Mechanic (pictured) content. He doesn’t strike me as someone who is unsympathetic to LGBTQIA+ matters, though his content never touches on anything like that so I’m just guessing
Calling a transmission a tranny just makes you sound 50 years old.
that was a decade ago. its 60 now.
“failed trans” sounds like a pejorative for detransitioners
I suppose it’s a sign of the times - how things move forward, and how we learn from them - wherever you are in the world.
I’m guilty of having used Ford Tranny in the south of England, as it was widely used as a shortened term for the Ford Transit van. There’s obviously no intention to use it as a slur as it’s literally just a sawn-off model name, but I can see the hurt it would cause to someone from the trans community.
Same in Scotland, “I heard it on the tranny” or “get the tranny on” is simply an expression for a radio receiver, short for the transistor radio. I absolutely understand how it could ruin someone’s day when used after being challenged however.
We live and learn.
Geography matters; smoking a fag in the UK and Ireland is quite normal, but in the US that’d be a hate crime!
Context matters, there’s a big difference between pointing at my car and saying ‘I fucked my trans.’ and pointing at my (hypothetical) partner and saying ‘I fucked my trans.’. Two completely different meanings.
I mean it’s unconfortable to hear it but it’s also an entirely different term
Like if you say your tranny failed and you point at your broken down vehicle, it’ll sound pretty awkward to a lot of folks these days, but unless they don’t know it’s used unrelatedly to refer to a transmission I can’t imagine many folks are likely to think you’re trying to describe them as a lesser, invalid human on the basis of how they relate to gender.
I’d find it a bit awkward or uncomfortable but I certainly wouldn’t take offense by it.
I don’t think anyone who’s used it to refer to like a transmission or transceiver or transit van is a bad person or anything. There’s a lot of room for misunderstanding but part of communication is knowing your audience. Honestly that’s probably the biggest reason I think it’s a good thing it’s falling out of favour- there’s less room for misunderstanding
reminds me of the debate in programming about the central branch yor all changes in git being called
master. people wanted the terminology changed because they thought it was about slavery, like master/slave hardware devices. but it’s not; it’s your known-good version, like a mastered mix of a music track. that word has a different root and was never connected to slavery.…but if you have to explain that every time, then changing it may be for the better. not because the people using it are bad, but because it makes new folks less likely to join. so the new default is
main.My issue with the ‘master’ debate is that the overwhelming number of people I saw fighting against its usage had only “added inclusive language to readme/CoC” as their GitHub history. At that point you’re not a programmer, you’re an idealogue injecting your preconceptions into a world that you don’t understand. Frankly we need less intervention and presumption from this single viewpoint, the western white imperialist, and more people asking questions as their default mode of interacting with things they don’t understand.
yeah that was an issue.
Tangentially related is whitelist/blacklist. Nowadays its more common to hear allowlist/denylist or blocklist. Though I’m moderately sure the dated term is coded in something racist, unlike your example.
Colour based terms are super cultural too from what I’ve been told, stuff like red being bad and green being good isn’t universal so imo it’s not a bad idea to use more explicit terminology.
Beyond that, if you go into reporting and the like, red/green colour coding for indicators isn’t accessible (colour blindness isn’t uncommon, last job I had a few colleagues with red/green and one with blue/yellow, I was told that making them very distinct shades helps a lot), people also print stuff out on monochrome printers (there’s old data viz wisdom that suggested designing for this) so I prefered symbols when I did more of that work, still suggest it when I get asked to review things.
How many people had to be explained what a master copy is? Do these same people need to be explained what a master degree is?
As for the ‘master and slave’ terminology, yeah it should go away, if anything because it was rarely even accurate. For example, the IDE interface refered the primary drive as master and the secondary as the slave. But the primary drive has absolutely no control of over the secondary. It just defines who gets the bus id of 0 and 1…
At some point, if enough people are annoyed and the alternative is just as valid, the annoyance of getting used to the new term is worthwhile.
I was annoyed by the change like 5ish years ago, when the movement started, but now idc anymore.
The change still annoys me at times as the default to git is still master. Its the hosted git (Github, Gitlab, etc) repos that default to main. And on occasion I get reminded this when I push a local initialized repo to them…
That’s configurable since Git 2.28. You can change
init.defaultBranchto main or trunk or whatever you want.
it happens enough that it became worth it to go with it. people new to any field will come into it with only the “common” understanding of words, and it’s such a small thing.
honestly even without it being the same as a slur it would only sound right coming from an aussie, otherwise it doesn’t feel like a natural shortening
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Imagine going to a mechanic because the engine is acting up and getting hit with “Your ignition timing is too retarded, it’s killing the engine” without the necessary context.
(to advance/retard ignition is the correct terminology for setting the timing ahead/behind top dead center; also used in aviation for moving the throttle levers towards a higher/lower power setting)
It’s weird how anglophones shorten names with the suffix -ny
I’m in the south of England. I’ve never heard a Transit being called a Tranny or Trans. I’m not in the business of using them though.
Midlands person here. I can confirm that tranny was/is short for the transit van.
And it was also short for transvestite.We never used it to mean a transmission, we have always called them gearboxes.
High five from a failed cis
What? Having issues with the water holding system?
Get a crack in your cistern?
Slowly leaking out of the water closet.
😔
