It’s pronounced /puh-LIS-i-mee/

Linguists call it polysemy: the fact that a word or phrase bears several meanings. The verb jump has nine basic meanings (up, down, fast motion, being startled, increasing, constantly shifting, forgoing a part, starting an engine, and attacking someone) — and we might jump at the chance to subdivide further. For the noun note, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (2009) counts eight basic senses and four additional idioms. Take note.

It’s a fact of language: the more common a word, the more its meanings. Someone once counted more than 700 senses for the verb run, though Longman identifies 34 core meanings and ten more idiom-specific senses. For lexicographers, such words are frightfully difficult. It’s much easier to define a rare term like runcation (the action of weeding) than it is to define a ubiquitous term like run.

The word master has seven core senses: (1) a man with authority (the master of his fate), (2) a skilled person (a past master of the short story), (3) an original document (do you have the master to copy?), (4) a teacher (Zen master), (5) a young boy (how is Master John today?), (6) a university official (master of Trinity College), (7) the captain of a vessel (the ship’s master). The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) identifies 25 senses. Writers of dictionaries can divide things up pretty finely.

In its oldest sense, dating in English from about 2,000 years ago, master denotes a leader or commander. It was a tenacious sense of the word: Until the mid 20th century, employment law was commonly called the law of master and servant. Master meant employer, and servant meant employee. By the 1950s, something about this terminology didn’t comport with the modern spirit of labor relations. The employment-law sense went into sharp decline.

This may have related to two things: the word’s inherent masculinity and its association with slaveholders, who were known as masters beginning in the mid 1700s. In African-American English, the word often became (as attested in the OED) either massa or mas. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Mark Twain represented it as mars (“Why, Mars Tom, I doan’ want no rats”).

In any event, the slaveholding associations of master fell precipitately after the abolition of slavery. It was a quiescent historical sense throughout the 20th century. Most of the other senses — always the predominant senses — were largely unaffected.

As you may know, though, the term has recently become the target of a campaign of eradication. Beginning in 2015, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and other universities scrapped master in various college-related phrases, such as master of the college (which has become head of the college). At Harvard, the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences emphasized that the change didn’t signal a belief that the term had been wrong all these years: “I have not been shown any direct connection between the term house master and the institution of slavery.”

In 2018, developers working with the computer-programming language Python made system-wide replacements of the terms master and slave, which had been used to denote database hierarchies. Black programmers had expressed discomfort (or worse) with the nomenclature. The Dutch inventors who used these terms in the first place — making master and slave metaphorical correlatives — must have been tin-eared. That terminology was certainly out of step with American sensibilities.

But what about other terms, like master bedroom? If that term were contrasted with slaves’ quarters, then certainly it would be objectionable. But that’s not the predominant history of the term at all.

Even so, since about 2020, many real-estate agents have stopped referring to a master bedroom (a phrase dating from 1821 in England); instead, it’s now primary bedroom or main bedroom, which is perhaps less metaphorical and more explicit. A California realtor explained the rationale to me the other day, right after I had used the phrase master bedroom: “We don’t use that phrase anymore. The terminology is changing to avoid racist connotations.”

My initial reaction (not uttered): “Poppycock!” She seemed to be suggesting that I had used racist language. One’s natural instinct is to feel defensive.

My second reaction was to think this was another step too far. “Come on, everybody knows it’s called the master bedroom, and you can’t just latch onto one historical subsense and therefore uproot a fully established term. The PC Police have run amok.”

My third reaction didn’t come until I began composing this column. I imagined myself as a real-estate agent, showing a house to a black couple. “And here is your master bedroom.” Suddenly, in my mind, the term’s associations became rather different.

What are we to think? Three positions are possible: (1) You could say that society mustn’t get stuck in its slaveholding past. Just forget this whole matter, stop overthinking things, and unmisgivingly use master in all the usual senses that have come down to us. (2) You could take much the same position but concede that it’s best to abstain from using master when black people are involved. (3) You could say that if a term is uncomfortable for one segment of the population — a segment traditionally subjected to various forms of racial discrimination — it’s just as well to let it fall away. As for No. 3, if you think it’s no big deal to use the word, then it should be no big deal to see it disappear. Fashions will change, and idioms will come and go.

The danger here is for sympathetic nonblack people to decide on a rule based on supposed sensitivities that might not even exist. Ultimately, English speakers as a whole will sort out these matters quite gradually.

Perhaps being a frequent public speaker has sensitized me and led me, on balance, to a version of position No. 3. In the early 1990s, as a young lecturer, I occasionally said, disapprovingly, that lawyers “slavishly copy” old forms. One morning, just as I was enunciating the word slavishly, my eyes were locked with those of a black audience member. I found myself embarrassed, and I haven’t used the word since. Nobody said anything to me. I’d like to think I just used common sense in realizing that unthinkingly or unquestioningly would be more accurate.

If we all agreed with position No. 3, would that mean that we’d stop using master altogether? We won’t have master’s degrees? Although predictions are dicey, I suspect not. Let’s check on this every 25 years or so and see how the English-speaking peoples feel about the matter. They may not know what polysemy means, but they know very well how to handle what it denotes. Like every linguistic matter, the resolution will ultimately be crowdsourced.