“Plug and socket”, industry group pushes for "obvious" change in terminology

https://cdm.link/2021/07/so-yeah-lets-just-use-plug-and-socket-industry-group-recommends-obvious-change-in-terminology/

by noutella • 5 years ago

19 67 5 years ago

liaukovv2• 5 years ago

Such proposals usually start with "self-evident" assertion of harm incorrect terminology causes, but is it actually measurable? Did anyone make research while isolating influence of such things? Sociology is such a shitshow

LunaSea• 5 years ago

Nope, it's classic outrage culture and bullying tactic.

Cthulhu_4• 5 years ago

Who is outraged and who is bullying in this case? It looks like the industry is being proactive and is pre-empting outrage. Using gendered terminology is unnecessary anyway, to the point where it becomes childish (giggle, boy plug goes into girl socket and you get sparks)

raxxorrax8• 5 years ago

You can call plugs "famale" too:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32861597805.html

technically gender neutral... although I find the double head a bit indecent...

anoncake5• 5 years ago

If this terminology actually causes harm we should see trans people and groups propose such a change, not an industry group looking for a PR opportunity.

Cthulhu_4• 5 years ago

You're saying it should be reactionary, that someone should get angry first. You're also making assumptions about the people pushing for this. Why not pre-empt it and save everyone a lot of headaches? You don't need to be a victim or to be offended to realize a problem and work on a fix. I mean I'm not affected or offended by your comment, yet here I am.

dmd• 5 years ago

They have been, for decades. The response has always been "to succeed this kind of change needs to come from within the industry".

wiredfool• 5 years ago

I've had individuals in affected groups ask me why I was using particular words as far as 30 years back. (in that case, it was IDE).

It's not really my place to be asserting that it's not offensive or causing harm, when it costs very little to be less offensive and more precise.

pyr0hu2• 5 years ago

absolutely agree. this feels like someone wants to do "something" but does actually nothing. this won't help or stop the abuse/hate/discrimination against women or trans (please dont hate me if i let someone out :()

purely a PR move.

shmageggy2• 5 years ago

Well such groups are praising the change, so it seems they support it. From the linked article

“Shoutout to PAMA for introducing neutral language for the audio industry,” said Karrie Keyes, Executive Director of the women-in-audio advocacy group SoundGirls.org, as well as monitor engineer for Pearl Jam/Eddie Vedder. “This is a tremendous undertaking and is important to continue working toward meaningful changes in our industry.”

CJefferson3• 5 years ago

How could you isolate such an effect? I'm sure the problem is linked to society as a whole -- the words only make sense because people relate them to genetalia.

People have done research by asking people what they think about such gendered terms, and people in the less represented gender (in whichever situation you are talking about) tend to dislike them.

cdot23• 5 years ago

Which is the less represented gender here?

liaukovv2• 5 years ago

Maybe less represented gender likes this terminology less because they understand it less(because they are less represented)

I'm just saying waving away the need for proving points before taking acion is doing more harm than good

raxxorrax8• 5 years ago

but is it actually measurable?

Of course not. Although this isn't sociology and shouldn't be blamed on the field. Yes, they have these guys, but it is a minority. It is just a silly group of industry partners.

squiggleblaz• 5 years ago

Oh please do. With something like an audio cable at least there's one end that is purely sticking out and one end that is purely sticking in. But with a lot of other cables there's a mix of inny bits and outy bits and it took me a long time to work out which bit I'm supposed to pay attention to to make the analogy work (the answer is to pay attention to any visible bits that carry a single/power. If this is obvious to you I suspect it was just because of how someone explained it to you, but if you're just brillianter than me then great!).

mcphage• 5 years ago

But with a lot of other cables there's a mix of inny bits and outy bits

If there's a mixture, is plug & socket any clearer?

quirkot• 5 years ago

Can confirm using "plug" for both male and female ends interchangeably

cdot23• 5 years ago

Which is clearly a more useable syntax

pyr0hu2• 5 years ago

how?

male and female clearly described which goes where. if you interchange "plug" , I won't know which cable extender or plug or cable will I buy.

lallysingh4• 5 years ago

The plug is part of the cable, the socket is part of the device. The geometry of the connector itself is irrelevant.

lotsofpulp7• 5 years ago

How would one differentiate between the type of cable end that goes into this outlet?

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Leviton-15-Amp-125-Volt-Locking-...

chha• 5 years ago

And this will cause issues when you have cable-into-cable. Then you'll have a plug into a plug, with no apparent difference.

emsign• 5 years ago

Sex isn't ewwww. It's a natural and everyday thing. I could ask the same question: What is wrong with you?

lotsofpulp7• 5 years ago

I believe that question is also offensive to someone, somewhere, hence not allowed.

Cthulhu_4• 5 years ago

It's not though, it's generally reserved for the bedroom and private spaces.

lotsofpulp7• 5 years ago

Performing it is. Talking about it is not. At least not when I was a kid, unless you were from some really socially conservative family.

senortumnus2• 5 years ago

Puritanism is back, baby!

0-_-0• 5 years ago

That's a good point. As an exercise for the reader, let's try to write an outrage article from the opposing viewpoint:

One of the shining examples of body shaming and societal opression of sexual expression is the recent push of changing the naming of audio plugs as "male" and "female", calling this naming "gross" and "problematic", as if genitalia was something to be ashamed of instead of treating it as a natural an everyday thing.

OK I'm not very good at this, I'm sure someone from the Guardian could do a much better job.

raxxorrax8• 5 years ago

Let's be honest. Sex is plenty ewww for US Americans that mostly are heading these language changes. It also feels like catholicism 2.0.

mg794613• 5 years ago

Thew fact alone that sex is being put away as "ewwwww" shows where the real problem lies. Now master and slave was already somewhat ridiculous discussion. This discussion is really a flag waver, as there is no negative connotation with different sexes. Usually written by self acclaimed experts.

lotsofpulp7• 5 years ago

I found some other interesting ones in the linked Google website:

https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation

raxxorrax8• 5 years ago

They have to give the inclusivity crowd some kind of work, but I think such rules are extremely counterproductive.

Company likes speech codes and NDAs, but this is just idiotic.

OJFord2• 5 years ago

Next up: AI cabling suggested to be sold in multi-packs only, so that you have spares if the first identifies differently to your requirement.

Note that we already have 'couplers' that allow 'mating' female-female or male-male cable ends, so I think any argument that it's homophobic language or whatever is on thin ground. Really the only valid (if I can call it that) argument against it is the author's 'eewwww', but.. really?

oxymoran2• 5 years ago

Why is male and female terminology bad here? Are we disputing that men have penises and women have vaginas? That doesn’t imply that you can’t have a sex change. Do trans people not generally convert their genitalia to match the destination sex?

MatthiasWandel2• 5 years ago

Just because something is true doesn't make it something we are allowed to acknowledge as being so.

jfengel• 5 years ago

No, they don't. A few do, but the operation is expensive, painful, and not always satisfactory. Many will take hormones and some will have non-genital surgeries, but full gender confirmation surgery is for a minority.

A great many, perhaps a majority, don't do anything to their bodies at all. They change their clothes, their pronouns, their hair, and their lifestyles, but have no surgery or medicines. They live in society as their gender, and anything that's seen only by the people they're intimate with are a subject for discussion between them.

The result is that yes, there are a fair number of men with vaginas and women with penises. Which doesn't matter to you unless you're either their doctor or their lover, but it's important to recognize that it is in fact the case.

CJefferson3• 5 years ago

I think the argument is, to understand this terminology, you have to reduce people to their sexual organs. This isn't a trans-related issue.

oxymoran2• 5 years ago

Is plug and socket any better? Aren’t you assigning binary signal processing roles to a spectrum? What if they want to identify simply as connectors?

raxxorrax8• 5 years ago

I think the underlying reaons is that the association is harmful alone, especially if the association contains somthing about sex. I think that is a fundamental misunderstanding.

I don't like people that advocate for language regulation, because they cannot even justify their positions, they just try to force it on others and wonder about the negative feedback.

"I doesn't cost much" is often an argument, but it remains silly from start.

lallysingh4• 5 years ago

Well said:

"To put it more simply – neutral language is always better for technical terminology, because it’s clearer, more accessible to more people, and includes the people who provide the talent and skills that make industries and technologies work. End of story."

MatthiasWandel2• 5 years ago

Plug/socket terminology is not necessarily the same as male/female terminology. The socket can be male, if it is the one with the metal pins. The power connector on the back of a PC is a good example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_faste...

Of course, people aren't necessarily using the terminology completely correctly as it is.

And then there's the connectors on fancy RF equipment that can assume either role!

OJFord2• 5 years ago

This is totally off-topic, I'm just startled (I don't know why, esp. knowing you worked at RIM) to see your username here! I recently discovered your channel & site (via Marius Hornberger's) and have had hours of entertainment 'binge-watching' through the entire back catalogue (nearly finished, sadly) - very many thanks.

To anyone else - wholeheartedly recommend woodgears.ca & https://www.youtube.com/c/Matthiaswandel/videos. The former's been discussed a few times too: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... (But again, because it's of general HN-type engineering-y interest - not all 'just' woodworking - not because it has any relevance to this particular submission.)

JoBrad• 5 years ago

I was informally taught that a plug goes into a socket. Cables and adapters commonly have the same connector on each end, making the plug/socket terminology even less descriptive of the connecting formats.

timw4mail• 5 years ago

Inny and Outy?

dvfjsdhgfv• 5 years ago

I believe the title of this Wikipedia article is wrong. When we started replacing the word "sex" with "gender" a few years ago, we were careful to differentiate both uses. But a few years later some people started to feel like "gender" is the new politically-correct word for "sex". It is not: these two have very distinct uses, and using "gender" for connectors is ridiculous because - as far as we can tell - they have no social identity (yet!).

denton-scratch• 5 years ago

Oh dear. The distinction between sex and gender again.

Back in the days of RS232, I owned a cable known as a "gender-bender". This was long before the days of Boy George. It was 8" long, and had a female DB-25 connector on each end. These things were also known as "eight-inch couplers", a term into which you could also read sexual connotations.

formerly_proven• 5 years ago

As an ESL person "plug and socket" only seems marginally less sexually-connotated than "male and female bits".

shmageggy2• 5 years ago

Are the scare quotes necessary? In this case, they are somewhat misleading, as it's not the industry group (Professional Audio Manufacturers Alliance) that called the changes obvious, but rather this particular article.

nanis• 5 years ago

I grew up with _fiş_ and _priz_. Presumably, they are words that were borrowed in to Turkish from French. To this day, I cannot remember which is which and I do not know the original French spellings. According to Google translate, _fiş_ is "prise de courant" so what the heck is _priz_ then?

Anyway, the point is, "male" and "female" made immediate sense. "plug" and "socket" don't seem to be exact analogues. When I think of a socket, I think more of things that are more permanent things like wall sockets or sockets on actual computers etc. Is there any reason to assume that all such things will always be receptacles? When I look at this picture[1], I see a set of "female" sockets next to a "male" socket using the disfavored terminology. As English is my second language, I do not know whether I should refer to the one that is "male" as a plug.

Another aversion I have to the general tendency to changing language by decree is the fact that I experienced the linguistic impoverishment visited upon the Turkish language as a result of the 20th century effort to remove words of Arabic and Farsi origin and somehow arrive at a "pure" language. Such efforts rarely lead to where their designers want them to go.

[1] https://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2007/08/inlet...

throwaddzuzxd• 5 years ago

To this day, I cannot remember which is which and I do not know the original French spellings. According to Google translate, _fiş_ is "prise de courant" so what the heck is _priz_ then?

_priz_ is "prise" (socket). _fiş_ is "fiche" (plug). The thing is that both can be either male or female.

When I think of a socket, I think more of things that are more permanent things like wall sockets or sockets on actual computers

That's definitely the case. A "prise" is a wall socket and a "fiche" is on a wire. I believe it's the actual definition of the terms.

“Plug and socket”, industry group pushes for "obvious" change in terminology

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