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Jarwaintoday at 7:37 AM0 repliesview on HN

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.