Everyone has a line of how much they are willing to change their language, though. There will always come a point where someone will think some change is "silly", even though the old term may have upset some people. And almost every term has some sort of baggage associated with it.
There was a post going around somewhere of a college's earnest attempt and change some language (like avoiding "give it a shot" because of the association of "shot" with guns). Would renaming all the various things we call "triggers" be ok, so we don't upset victims of gun violence?
So the master->main change was the line for some people, not others.
As a matter of principle I don't think we should be moving towards ignoring any and all contexts of words. Granting this power of word banning to random arbiters is quite crazy. In this case, master was moreso changed because it -could- be deemed offensive, not that it -actually- is offensive by itself. Not one person that I've spoken to about it has actually cared.
Words having multiple usages is not really a novel concept. If we ban words based on them potentially being offensive, we'll end up with no words at all as people move onto using different words, and so forth.
It is not silly to have pushback when someone wants to grant themselves power over language usage. Dropping usage of a word should have a strong, tenable argument and larger community support than 0.00000001% of people caring.
> Everyone has a line of how much they are willing to change their language, though.
But that line is constantly moving though. People are forced to adapt, or they are ostracised socially and economically.
If prestigious organisations, people and institutions decide "master/slave" is an immoral thing to say, I have no choice. Eventually I'll need to fall in line or my livelihood will be at risk.
There was a post going around somewhere of a college's earnest attempt and change some language (like avoiding "give it a shot" because of the association of "shot" with guns). Would renaming all the various things we call "triggers" be ok, so we don't upset victims of gun violence?
So the master->main change was the line for some people, not others.