Dave Winer
He points out there are
Master Bedrooms
Master Degrees
Me adding
- The Masters Tournament
and of course
... and then of course the music world has the concept of owning your own ‘Masters’ …
@JohnPhilpin I do feel conflicted about some uses of masters. My field still functions somewhat on the old guild-style master/apprentice model and the Master’s in my MFA refers to that tradition. It feels like a big loss to me and I’m struggling over whether the word has been so tainted by slavery that I should give it up. //@simonwoods
@Bruce I remember when my father used to address letters to me as Master Richard Newman because I was still a boy and not yet a Mister. Now I wonder where that usage actually originated.
The question of whether the word has been so tainted by slavery that we ought not to use it is a complex one. Would it apply to the verb as well, the adjectival form, etc? I’m not trying to be pedantic, but it’s one thing to avoid it in situations where it actually conjures slavery—as in master and slave cylinders—and another to decide that this association delegitimizes other forms/usages. //@johnphilpin @simonwoods
@rnv I seem to recall having an etymology that went through old French and then back to classical Latin magister which means master in the sense of “teacher”. However after over 2,000 years, it’s going to shift, twist, and even break in its meanings over time. I’d be willing to bet there are easily 5-10 different definitions and shades of meaning on the word now (some even archaic), but some of which are now problematic in how they relate to power dynamics in society. Of course if you want to really go crazy on historical linguistics, I recently ran across an etymology for the word Lord which was totally not what I was expecting but which is historically fascinating.