They say "we are not attempting to assign levels of harm to the terms on this site", and then proceed to list a huge number of terms, some of which are almost universally viewed as discriminatory or harmful and some of which are almost universally viewed as _not_ discriminatory or harmful. They may not be explicitly claiming that these terms have equivalent negative impact, but the presentation does nothing to suggest otherwise, and in many cases neither do the explanations.

As I said in my original comment, it's an "arson, murder, and jaywalking" approach - as if someone had just given you a list saying "these things are illegal, don't do them" without noting that one of them can be punished by life in prison and another is so widely disregarded that it'll be viewed as odd if you never do it.

I object to the existence of this particular list because I think it's extremely poorly done - to the point of being actively harmful to efforts to reduce offensive language - and would be incredibly confusing to anyone who didn't already have the fairly deep linguistic and cultural competence required to know which parts to take seriously and which parts to ignore.

I don't object to the general existence of lists of this type, but I do think they're often subject to the same pathologies this one is.

> I still think my original question stands - why wouldn’t I want to avoid most of these terms? Isn’t the list useful if I would?

I think a huge section of this list is not helpful to anybody. "Red team", "yellow team", and "black box" have nothing to do with race whatsoever, for example, nor would a reasonable person think they did; eliminating them from your vocabulary would do no more to address racial injustice than eliminating "armadillo" would. And I do think there are costs to urging people to monitor their speech to greater and greater degrees for rapidly decreasing - and in many cases zero - benefit.

I wish online forums encouraged civil discussion like this more than they seem to. So much knee-jerk even here.

1. By saying certain phrases could be understood to be harmful, even when they aren't commonly understood to be and explicitly don't have racist or sexist etymologies, the list is actually reinforcing the threads of harmful stereotypes in our language. Black box is not a racist term; adding it to a list like this just associates black=bad, which is not something we should want at all.

2. Lists like this encourage black-and-white thinking about language that ignores context. It's the same sort of thinking that leads to your white uncle complaining that rappers use the n word, so why can't he? Words don't hurt; how words are used hurt.

3. Lists like this are ripe for abuse. While I have heard interesting discussions about how certain language can be harmful (The Allusionist podcast recently had an interesting discussion over terms like neuro-divergent, neuro-typical, autism and so on), it is often used in a bullying way to dismiss and discredit someone who is trying to engage in good faith rather than to educate. Consider "rule of thumb". The etymology presented is wrong, but wide spread. Maybe the fact that many people believe this is enough to avoid it, but the list doesn't present this nuance and instead perpetuates the myth.

"We are not attempting to assign levels of harm to the terms on this site" means literally nothing but "we shouldn't be held accountable for intermingling actual racial slurs with misinterpreted Wikipedia articles".

I don't see how trying to cover your ass at the start of an article somehow invalidates the content of the article.