I dunno, man. You're right that the term "mainboard" isn't going to kill us, and I wouldn't advise anyone to make this their main crusade in life. But that's a pretty high standard of dismissiveness and I've never seen anyone apply it to language changes that genuinely bug them. If we discovered that Google employees call codebases which have a lot of bugs "gay", and people got angry about it, would you tell them that it's not a big deal because Google has just developed the language a bit?
>But that's a pretty high standard of dismissiveness and I've never seen anyone apply it to language changes that genuinely bug them.
I am applying that dismissiveness to all objections equally based off their motivation. I don't agree with the argument on either side of the "motherboard/mainboard" debate. But I can emphasize with the motivation of the side pushing for "mainboard" because it is the same as your argument about misusing "gay" being unnaceptable. I disagree with their specific objection but I understand the motivation. I don't understand the side pushing for "motherboard" because the heart of the objection seems to be "things were better when I was young". Presented with those two options, why not side with the people who you would side with if we were arguing over a different word such as "gay"?
It's true that things were different when we were young, but that's true of any new phenomenon and it's not the heart of the objection. If young people these days want to avoid saying "wonderful", or use women by default in hypothetical scenarios, or go around checking their pulse while they say "sheeeeesh", I have no real concerns about those things and I think most people on team "motherboard" would agree.
The reason I push against "mainboard" is, I think, the analogous concern. While it's possible in principle to type out the letters "mainboard" without meaning anything by it, in practice the people who say it are motivated by a package of ideas about gender which I think are bad and would be harmful for society if they were more broadly adopted. To say "mainboard" would make me appear to be endorsing those ideas.
>in practice the people who say it are motivated by a package of ideas about gender which I think are bad and would be harmful for society if they were more broadly adopted
I would argue this is a symptom of the same phenomenon and therefore the heart of the objection is still the same.
Is it possible in your view for any new trend to be bad and worth fighting against? It's hard for me to see how this doesn't reduce to a content-free "nothing really matters" objection.
Sure, if there is any evidence behind the objection I can support it. When the objection is some vague claim about it being "harmful for society" without anything to back that up, I will call BS.
