This all is making my head hurt.
A couple of weeks ago we lost Illegal Immigrants.
Now we’re losing the Master Bedroom.
Homebuilders scrap ‘master bedroom’ because of racist, gender-biased connotations:
The “master suite” is being phased out — not from our homes, but from our lexicon.
A survey of 10 major Washington, D.C.-area homebuilders found that six no longer use the term “master” in their floor plans to describe the largest bedroom in the house. They have replaced it with “owner’s suite” or “owner’s bedroom” or, in one case, “mastre bedroom.”
Why? In large part for exactly the reason you would think: “Master” has connotation problems, in gender (it skews toward male) and race (the slave-master).
Enter the owner’s suite.
“I imagine it’s not only a more accurate description but also a more politically correct term of art,” said Steve Nardella, senior vice president of operations for Bethesda-based Winchester Homes Inc.
Either way, the “master suite” has been linguistically shoved aside.
Think it’s stupid?
Never underestimate the power of stupid.
Did you ever think they’d try to ban Illegal Immigrants, Black List, Chink in the Armor, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Rejigger, Black Friday, and even the use of white copy paper?
This language war is just gobbledygook, if you ask me. (Can I say that?)
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gobbledygook?
Now you’ve done it!
Turkey and Viet Nam are highly insulted!
In electrical engineering there is something called a “master-slave flip flop”. Will that be renamed as well?
Don’t forget Master-Slave hard drives or Master keys.
I guess the kill switch is next.
“Master” as in slave “owner”.
Oh, now, isn’t that well thought out.
“Obama’s Chechens are coming home to roost!” –
at least we can still state this fact.
I am your master.
I am your owner.
gee I know which one I like better.
I own you.
How about illegitimate bedrooms
or .. subordinate bedrroms
MasterLock is trademarked. I think that gets into a completely different area of law….
I sleep in my master of the universe bedroom.
At least when my students in Japan butchered the English language, it was done innocently, and often to good comedic effect. A few excerpts from the diaries I had my Japanese students keep in English:
“Today I went boring.”
“I made soup of chicken trash that is remains last dinner.”
“My mother went to Taiwan to trip with her friends.”
“I was busy today at my work office because I didn’t exist two days last week.”
“My wife had a slight beastly headache.”
“I was happy I could play tennis yesterday. I lived a full life.”
“I went to the hospital to meet my mother. She is 85 years old, but I didn’t tell her about that.”
“It is delightful so we are very sad.”
“The ship managed to get on me.”
“Her leg’s finger was a little swelled but she seems to be all right.”
“I usually dry my skin during winter.”
“My husband and I went to the Furank Shinatora concert.”
“I had a Canon camera but it took my daughter Yuka to Yokohama. My husband and I enjoyed handling our camera all day.”
“We had a noodle for lunch. Later we didn’t feel hungry because a noodle for lunch sat heavy on our stomach.”
Great stuff! My friend at the stereo store 25+ years ago had Japanese-made CD’s with liner notes in “Japlish,” as he called it. Is it racist to have a good chuckle? Another one I like is “All your bases are belong to us,” that the Professor likes to use.
A couple weeks ago my wife sent me a text message to update me after the second game of our daughter’s volleyball tournament. It read,
“One won lost won.”
A man goes on a trip. When he comes home his brother tells him .. “your cat died”
The man says “gee, couldn’t you package that a little better by saying that the cat had wandered out onto the roof and after multiple efforts to save the cat, it fell and couldn’t be saved.”
A few weeks later, the man goes on another trip. When he comes home his brother tells him .. “Mom wandered out onto the roof …“
Several years ago, when I installed a second hard drive on my desktop computer with the intent of running Linux on one and Windows on the other, I had to bone up on how to set things up to have one hard drive be the “master” and the other be the “slave.” Even back then, there were those who were wrangling over the words. Such people are as much fun as a case of stomach flu.
Bunk. What a load of bunk! Language is imprecise enough already without these little twits replacing accuracy with vagueness. Owner’s bedroom? I guess they never heard of slave owner? Petty soon, we will only be able to say ‘a, an’ and ‘the’.
I’m sick of this absurd fear of language.
We often claim to “pull out all the stops,” even though few of us actually do play the pipe organ.
We still get “put through the wringer” long after the electric clothes dryer has been invented. (I love it when people write “put through the ringer,” because they have no damned idea what a “wringer” is.)
The list of archaic remnants in our language is seemingly endless. Who cares? …Well, I guess idiots care.
I always like to accuse these language police of being hysterical, and wait for them to call me on the sexist nature of the word “hysterical.” They never do. So it’s clear that what we don’t know can’t hurt us.
Such a fuss about such a niggling issue.
its surely not a niggardly use of words
It may be that there will be a severe backlash to the creeping newspeak. Only time will tell if it’s double plus ungood or not.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgQxfYKYqBk
The purveyors of PC language, those who cannot generate anything worth anything, must keep the issue of racism vogue otherwise they will have no more political leverage.
If they were to lose political leverage then there would be no more freebies or affirmative action or even fake Indians.
What are Master Chefs going to be called now? And is the Masters Golf Tournament too plantation-esque?
Well, we could reverse the copy process and use black copy paper but then we would be printing White on top of Black.
Oh, the horror of the symbolism, it would be good for at least a few hundred PhD dissertations…at Columbia.
Oh, Professor, “gobbledygook” is a really bad one as Joy said above. Let’s start with “gook”. From the Urban Dictionary, “A derrogatory term used for the purpose of describing a korean.” And “gobbledy”, well according to the “free dictionary” that means” “Unclear, wordy jargon.(Imitative of the gobbling of a turkey.)” So, you’ve offended Koreans and turkeys. You better watch yourself Dr. Jacobson, those are two groups you don’t want mad at you. Imagine if they came after you at the same time! Picture that!
Unfortunately, we will never succeed to remove idiot from the lexicon or the population.
PC is politically correct is progressive corruption.
Forward… to dysfunctional convergence (DC).
“Think it’s stupid?
Never underestimate the power of stupid.”
That’s what got us here in the first place.
How about “Partners’ Suite.” Now, how could that offend anyone??
“Partners Suite would offend those opposed to gay marriage, or to living in sin. They might want “spousal suite”…
Yeah, it might. But we don’t count.
My wife hates it more than I do. I picture us hopping on horses, shouting “howdy, pardner!”
I worked for a large regional home builder back before the great housing crash of 2007. They changed ‘master suite’ to ‘owner’s suite’ at least 10 years ago.
Which term is used more often, ‘slave master’, or ‘slave owner’? I’m thinking owner is more commonly used in that example.
You guys are fussing about bedroom language while this is going on:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,360427,00.html
What do you call that? I’m speechless.
Crypto suite? Eventually you have to come out of the closet, though.
At least this current example of PC run amok gives those involved a bit of cover for the, oh, I don’t know, let’s be conservative and say, two-and-one-half minutes it takes the average teenager to figure out what was meant when the 6/10 D.C. area home builders are publicly accused of linguistic ownerbation.
So umm, a kid gets a job on a fishin’ boat, starts off as a junior baiter. After a year or so Capn’ says doin’ a great job kid, gonna promote you to master.
Just like all Lefties..
Hmmmm… Y’suppose that Master Lock will have to undergo a name change???
Suffice to say that the idiotic political correctness taking place in Washington DC does not likely reflect any kind of broad trend. Moreso the bubble of lunacy is infecting more of society in the fever swamp of DC.
Nuke the site from orbit. Its the only way to be sure.
When I was a kid, we called the big bedroom “Mom and Dad’s room.” I am sure that is now even more politically incorrect that “master” or “owner.”
This is an exercise in mental mastrebation. (Ownernism?)
Heh – That’s only the beginning of the PC language-censorship frenzy if the ACLU realizes how many commonly-used English idiomatic expressions come from their main target: Judeo-Christianity and the BIBLE.
In honor of the 200th Anniversary one young British pastor decided to go through the Bible, verse by verse to find these phrases and discuss them online: http://kingsenglish.info/
When the ACLU realize how many of these phrases exist, they may try to ban English altogether.
Clarification – 200th Anniversary of the (much overdue, blood-bought*) King James Bible in English.
*Numerous lives were sacrificed to give us the Bible in our native spoken language.
Correction – 400th Anniversary of the KJV.
“Owner suite”?
But doesn’t the term “owner” also have a distasteful racial connotation problem (“slave OWNER”)?
And doesn’t the term “owner” also conflict with the Marxist theory of communal property?
Perhaps we should all just say the “great big bedroom,” or perhaps the “Swiss bedroom.” That way we don’t offend anyone.