I should preface this by saying that I personally don't feel that strongly about this one way or the other. But it came up in another forum that isn't the right place to talk about it, and I've been trying to make a point of doing my part to move some of those conversations to a better location.
I was mildly surprised during registration by the inclusion of expletives as something that was ruled out by the conference code of conduct. My (not particularly well-researched) impression is that use of non-gendered expletives in English is something that's become somewhat generational. Using four-letter words was considered very impolite and unacceptable in professional public venues in my parents' generation, but appears to hardly be noticable in the generation in college now, with a change point somewhere around my generation. To be specific about what words I'm talking about, I have seen people use both "shit" and "fuck" in a professional HR presentation context with basically no reaction (although the latter is much less common). Several speakers used those or similar words during various presentations; often they were immediately apologetic, but the audience appeared not to take this part of the code of conduct particularly seriously. Now, it's quite possible that I'm rather privileged here and am just unaware of the issues. I am *not* asking for this to be changed, at least at this point. However, I am curious as to what was the intent for including that rule in the code of conduct. Specifically, I'm wondering if this posed a concern for any of the attendees, or if it was just something that seemed like it would be appropriate to have in the code of conduct. I should be clear here that I'm only talking about words that either never had or that are used outside of any sexual meaning, and are not used in a way that implies any sexual meaning. I am specifically *not* talking about gendered expletives or sexual innuendo, and would support continuing to rule out such things in the code of conduct. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> _______________________________________________ Debconf-discuss mailing list Debconf-discuss@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-discuss
