Portuguese has the word "mestre" from the same Latin origin. Since it has evolved in a separate context, it may give a glimpse of the original meaning, way before slavery. A "mestre", in Portuguese, is one of three concepts:
- Someone who has mastered some art;
- A teacher;
- The lead artisan in a team, the one who has mastered the art, teaches and leads.
The slave master is a very narrow interpretation on these meanings, and the woke push against the word is myopic. The word has a long history, none of it connected to slavery.
This is the same in British English. I found the main/master switch absurd. I went to school, and was taught by masters: an English master, History master and so on. In my cultural context, the switch was just cultural colonialism from America.
This is the same in other European languages. For example in Polish, the equivalent word, "mistrz", refers to all the things GP said, but doesn't even have a meaning that could be applied to slavery.
As for American English, wake me up when they rename Master's degree.
Also, even with the master/slave interpretation, there's nothing wrong with it. It's not offensive to use terms that refer to slavery. No reasonable person thinks "oh because this database has a master and slave replica the maintainers think slavery was ok". No reasonable person is so psychologically fragile that the mere mention of slavery hurts them.
> No reasonable person is so psychologically fragile that the mere mention of slavery hurts them
And yet, weirdly to me, there's a lot of people acting like it costs them personally to switch words.
I never gave this topic much thought when it first came up, because it never mattered to me in the fist place if the default branch was called "master" or "A1" or "πρώτα".
Someone wants it called different because of aesthetics? Sure, have fun with the new name! It's no more significant to me than "jif" (the cleaning fluid) being renamed "cif", or Marathon, Snickers.
Of course, if anyone were to have suggested to me that the name alone would be enough to solve racism forever, I might have pointed that the Berlin Wall's official name translated as "anti-fascist protection barrier", as an example of the way people use words to divert from a complete lack of real action or worse to act in direct opposition to the normal meaning of the words.
- Someone who has mastered some art;
- A teacher;
- The lead artisan in a team, the one who has mastered the art, teaches and leads.
The slave master is a very narrow interpretation on these meanings, and the woke push against the word is myopic. The word has a long history, none of it connected to slavery.