English Language & Usage Asked by Tony Ennis on May 23, 2021
My line of work is abstract – I could name some items, but it would not help.
So, I have two nouns. They have a parent-child relationship. But lately I realize that it is sometimes unhelpful to treat these items as though they are separate. That is, the child’s allowable behaviors are tightly controlled by the parent’s.
‘associated’ and ‘coupled’ are too weak
‘parasitic’ has a negative connotation
‘master/slave’ ehhh no.
‘major/minor’ maybe but doesn’t really imply behavior, and this is all about behavior.
And I need a word that describes the child item, and a word for the parent too. I could call the child node ‘dependent’ but then the parent node would be called ???
An example of this relationship occurs in the Observer Design Pattern.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_pattern
The names for the parent and child here would be subject and observer.
A different example, which puts more emphasis on the parent’s ability to control as opposed to the child’s ability to interpret, can be found in Control Theory.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory
Here the parent would be the controller. The child could be descibed generically as a dependent.
These are examples from the world of machines. The human world offers many more examples, such as master/servant, parent/child, captain/mate, etc. However, if the intent is to not anthropomorphize the description, electrical and computer engineering offers some possibilities.
In the first example, you have an observing relationship. In the second case, you have a controlling relationship.
Answered by Global Charm on May 23, 2021
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