I refer anyone who thinks they can do this to a Vsauce video where Michael tries essentially this for 3 days and has a very bad time.

I'm not even arguing, I'm trying to clarify what we're even talking about in the first place and you're reading past me and finding intent where there is none

Neat. I agree. I think it's unlikely that a reasonable person would mistake "American" for "Non-US North American". Perhaps the point of contention is related to Native Americans versus citizens of the USA. That too I think is a weird and unrealistic angle though. Who knows

I feel like you must be intentionally missing the point. This is not teaching material. It doesn't distract from the content of courses. It's not related at all to student activities or curriculum. It's a list of words that the IT department wanted to have an internal discussion about concerning content on the school's website. Something along the lines of "Do you guys think we're okay to use the word 'damn' on the school bookstore's website?"

Also, I've never heard someone say they've been "grandmothered" into an outdated pricing plan. And I'm not sure in which context you think you would choose one over the other. But that's beside the point.

The reason someone might call out "American" is because Canadians also live in North "America". The reason someone might call out "Grandfather" as in "this student was grandfathered into the system where..." is because it's a gendered word.

Again, these aren't reasons to not use those words, they're not widely offensive, and they're not on a ban list. They're on a list of words that someone somewhere might find exclusive, and they're on that list as a sort of catalogue so they can be discussed internally in Stanford's IT dept.

Lol

An unofficial, work-in-progress list of terms next to ways they could be interpreted as exclusive is not equivalent to an official university-wide banned words list.

I personally think getting upset at the phrase "kill two birds with one stone" is silly. So do, probably, most people at that university. The IT department has only catalogued that someone might complain about it because they think it's harmful to evoke imagery of violence toward animals.

But I suppose the above is a pretty long headline isn't it