alt Hacker NewsAllowlist/Denylist are clear and perhaps more specific, but blacklist/whitelist are not arbitrary, they're just using black in valid ways according to common English dictionaries, which is similar to how other languages use the word black, but it is less specific.
> If you'd like to explain Why the word means what it does I'd love to hear it
Simply because black means different things depending on the context. Evil, invisible, mysterious, absence of light, sinister. It's not arbitrary because that's how the word black is commonly used.
I'm not trying to argue about validity here, but rather that these definitions/meanings of the word black are not "primary" definitions but secondary meanings based on that contextual/cultural/colloquial use. Arbitrary in the sense that that "commonality" is arbitrary and cultural, and language could just have easily developed to flip the colloquial definition.
Contrasted against using words where the Primary definition is the one that matters.
Imagine an alien culture encountering the word. Blacklist versus Denylist. The latter requires a lot less context to understand the meaning, because "Deny" has a single pretty consistent definition.