White people wanting names that are both rare enough in English to be unique but also evocative enough to be memorable tend to land on things that are blindly appropriative
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Replying to @dulcedejae @BootlegGirl
But honestly the Apache thing almost flies under the radar considering how many things in electronics and computing are still called "slaves"
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Replying to @dulcedejae
I mean, even there I'm not defending it and I'm glad github removed that terminology but slavery is sort of a big bad thing that's existed in many forms and referencing it is icky but not quite in the same way that using an existing ethnic group's name is
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Replying to @BootlegGirl
oh idk I think it's way worse? A server called Apache because somebody thought it sounded cool is tacky and ignorant but it's not like it's directly using an analogy to a brutal system of exploitation in order to explain what a hard drive is doing
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Replying to @dulcedejae
I'm pretty sure that terminology dates back to electrical engineering though? So if nothing else, at least it wasn't the idea of early computer programmers, they inherited it, probably without thinking due to white privilege
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Replying to @BootlegGirl @dulcedejae
Fun fact: servant, server, and service all derived from the latin word for slave, too.
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And "serf", which evolved to mean a specifically different kind of servitude than what we now call "slavery" But yes what we mean by "servant" today is pretty far removed from a Roman "servus"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @bazzalisk and
Ironically, the actual word "slave" comes from "Slav" and is specifically because the Slavic peoples were frequently conquered and forced into servitude by other cultures in the Middle Ages It could be considered an ethnic slur
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Replying to @arthur_affect @bazzalisk and
It goes full circle, it was once commonly believed that the Serbs were named after the Latin root "servus" because of being frequently trafficked as slaves, although this is now believed to be a false etymology
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Yeah, now though to be a cognate, not a descendant. So latin “servus” and serbocroat Srbi both come from a PIE root meaning “guard”.
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And the Slavs' own root word for "slave" or "servant" is the source for the word "robot"
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Interestingly Hero is also cognate to Servus.
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Replying to @bazzalisk @arthur_affect and
Does make you wonder how the PIE word for “guard” ended up meaning slave in latin.
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End of conversation
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