As I am sure all of you know, in late 2003 Los Angeles County officials declared unacceptable the current labeling of primary and secondary interoperable electronics components, most notably computer hard drives, as "master" and "slave" devices.
Officials made the formal request to suppliers in response to a complaint filed by a worker after he saw the terms printed on video recording equipment and informed the Office of Affirmative Action Compliance.
The terms were then officially deemed offensive, despite the cries of manufacturers eager to maintain the industry-standard labels, as well as those of vociferous free speech proponents.
Well, it bears mentioning that this is not a case of freedom of speech. This is a case of idiocy.
It doesn't take a linguist or a logo-maniac to see that words that have been appropriated for naughty causes need not be considered everywhere offensive. Witness the occasional "queer observation," "eager beaver" or "bitchin' heat," to name just a few. It is not fair to renounce a word's entire lexical integrity on account of one definition's transgressions.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it is subjective, relying on what a word reminds a particular person of rather than what the word actually means in the given context. How many words will have to fall prey to the PC "Gestapo" before we as decent citizens stand up and demand our dictionary back?
Case in point: the laundry room. Every time I run out of underwear and am consequently forced to begin the lavatorial process, I begin by dutifully segregating my whites from my coloreds. Some of my more astute readers may point out, if they know me personally, that I do not actually have any white clothes (except, of course, that one pair of oh-so-aromatic XXL panties I lifted from the dryer load of the jumbo-juicy vixen down the hall, but then washing those would run counter to their purpose anyhow). Still, this is beside the point. I am certain that someone, somewhere, has had the evil of racial segregation so infused into the meanings of the words "white" and "colored" that he would not think twice before transmuting his dirty clothes into a sartorial bias incident.
And if chance resemblance is good enough for the semantic, then why not the phonetic as well? Are words whose meanings are denotatively unbesmirched really to be jettisoned on the measly grounds that they happen to sound like another, less decorous word? If so, then I will never be able to dismiss my Korean friend, whose ideas are a smidge unstable, as a kook. I cannot refer to a female infantry as a bunch of militant grunts. I will never thank my Latina maidservant for keeping my house spic-and-span, and if I should ever run across a husky Chinese fellow, I would certainly be remiss in calling him a chunk. Of course, heaven help me if I ever extol a pair of lesbian adoptive parents for raising such well-mannered, adorable little tykes.
With the aforesaid hard drive drivel already in place in L.A. County, and more definition-snatching legislation in the works (check out, for example, Britain's proposed "Gender Recognition Bill," which would criminalize the use of such offensive terms as "man" and "woman" in spite of objective reality), it is clear that the literate need to speak up for their lexicon and oppose all forms of linguistic profiling at all costs.
We must defend the right of each and every utterance to express its meaning fully, freely, and functionally, without harassment based on sound or ancestry. Any view of language that fails to recognize these simple truths can only be described as downright niggardly.
