You mean virtue signaling. Replacing an established and perfectly fine word has never helped a single user in the history of the universe.

hmm yeah I dunno, I don't think my boss was 'virtue signalling' by asking me to replace instances of 'invalid'.

I suspect by 'virtue signalling' you mean he was angling to impress me with how virtuous he was. (because the users never saw my code before the audit)

Why would he try to impress me? or think it would?

I never noticed the quixotic reaction against perceived 'virtue signalling' until sometime this century, and that code audit was back in the 90s.

I'm not certain but I do think it was actually prompted by a previous experience with a confused user who had the word printed on a receipt and mistakenly thought the term referred to them!

I think it's more that if users actually have mistakenly read a word and taken offense, it's easier to just use a different word than have to deal with the occasional upset person.

I do think the people going round proactively trying to change all the words with alternative negative meanings are a bit ridiculous though; if nobody's offended, you don't need to pretend to be offended on others' behalf.

Polysemy is a fundamental concept in most (all?) languages. I am not aware of a language without polysemes.

Should we replace “driver”, because people might confuse them with people driving cars? How about “tree”? Are you confused by river “banks”?

“What, commit trees don’t grow on soil?”

“What do you mean? I can’t sit on the same bank that manages my money?”

You cannot and should not design for the lowest common denominator, which is a person not familiar with basic language concepts.

If you think that “master” branch is offensive, YOU are the problem, not the language.

I might not find "master branch" to be offensive, but if somebody I'm working with asks to rename it, I'm okay with that.

Well yeah, people can be unreasonable sometimes - but from a business perspective, changing a word is better than having a few upset customers. That's literally what I was saying above.

Polysemy is orthogonal to the cases I am aware of in which people are concerned about the primary meaning, an example being "slave" to refer to an item that is bound or subservient.

And even in that case I think it depends on the word and how prominent the negative association is. "Disabled" seems a stretch to me, so I'd want to dig deeper and confirm it's actually a concern with some subset of users as opposed to trolling. But on the other end of the spectrum people who insist on using terms like "slave" at this point seem to be mostly using it as an excuse to virtue signal their adherence to principles of free speech.

Depends on what you replace it with, I don’t mind replacing ‘master’ with ‘main’, but all the hubbub around it made me obstinately stick with ‘master’.

Replacing ‘invalid’ with something like ‘incorrect’ seems much less likely to set people off.