Originally published at: Clubhouse tells Microsoft Program Manager she can't join because her name isn't real | Boing Boing
…
11 Likes
Haven’t we just had this issue brought up on another topic?
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
20 Likes
There are only that many phonemes or syllables in human speech (although more that most people think) and almost any reasonably short word you can make with them will be something that somewhere means something rude/objectionable/funny/illegal/etc.
Also every rude English word means something totally unremarkable somewhere else.
Get over it.
9 Likes
So which language(s) have innocuous meanings for fk or ct?
1 Like
Hmm asterisks removed. Try f__c or c__t
1 Like
I was going to make the same point rather more pejoratively and without the asterisks.
(NB they weren’t ‘removed’ as such; they made the letters in between into bold text. Also, fuck ends in a k not a c.)
1 Like
Tried them both, can recommend. But to answer your earlier question:
Fucking is a town in Austria, world famous for missing their placename signs again. Fuk also means seal in Volapük, but I guess you knew that.
Kunt is a regular conjugation of the Dutch verb Kunnen (To Can,) to wit the inquisitive so any polite request in Dutch starts with Kunt U. 
6 Likes
Probably from the Latin “Phoca” which is the name of the genus.
The irish word for “word” is focail, pronounced “fuckle”. Probably the best accidental pseudo-swear.
5 Likes
Don’t forget Scunthorpe in England. They definitely have a hard time with this kind of thing.
12 Likes
Not since November. Oberfucking and Unterfucking are yet to change their names.
Scunthorpe remains Scunthorpe.
9 Likes
Clubhouse, as its name implies, is the opposite of inclusive. Based on what I’ve read about the invitiation-only site, the Groucho approach seems the wisest course to take at the moment.
19 Likes
And even English words can be “suitable for kids” in one place and “not fit for polite company” in another, fanny being a particularly good example.
9 Likes
Like Semprini.
: Gets bodily picked up and thrown out by two large bouncer-like people :
5 Likes
Good thing her last name isn’t “M oi st” …
Crazy platforms and their dumb sensitivity filters…
4 Likes
11 Likes
To be fair, there are a lot of people making up names that have a “naughty” meaning. I actually met a Harry Butts, once.
I had a paintball friend whose dad was Greek and he had this impossibly long last name. He said that often times on “official” forms that he runs out of room.
I set up templates for variable print items. We have to set these up to be fleixble, but invariably there will be someone with a huge name, or more often a title, that we have to make a custom version for.
4 Likes
The collection of sounds / letters is meaningless in other languages.
For example, if I someone who only spoke English and “yinjing,” or wrote it out it would be meaningless to the hearer/ reader.
Think of all those people who have “Asian” tattoos that they got because they look cool.
Side track for tangentially related story
Our boss in grad school (who was, himself Chinese) made all the Chinese folks (post docs down to undergrads) pick an “American” name because “it would be easier.” If you did NOT pick a name, one would be assigned to you. By him.
a) One poor dude became “Geoffrey” With a G. Thankfully this was pre GoT in the public eye.
b) One girl went with Joel, because it sounded cool. She got it from a belt buckle.
c) Boss went by his Chinese name.
I wonder what it is with this “real names policy”. Who is Clubhouse to say that my name isn’t “Donald Duck”?
A German sunday newspaper used to run a column called “What does Helmut Schmidt think about (insert political topic here)?” Now, Helmut Schmidt used to be federal chancellor of West Germany in the 1970s and early 1980s (notorious for chain-smoking, he died in 2015 at the ripe old age of 96), but “Helmut Schmidt” seems to be a reasonably common name for people in Germany. So every week a different Helmut Schmidt got to opine about a topic of current interest – this week Helmut Schmidt the 37-year-old lorry driver from Wuppertal, the next week Helmut Schmidt the 75-year-old retired dentist from Stuttgart, you get the idea. They may have stopped in the end because either they ran out of alternative Helmut Schmidts, or the joke wasn’t funny anymore after Helmut Schmidt had died. But it wouldn’t be at all surprising if any of these tried to sign up to some over-eager web service and be refused because “ha ha very funny, pull the other one, you’re not Helmut Schmidt”.
6 Likes
Good to meet you, Doctor.
5 Likes
“Phuc” is a common Vietnamese name. It’s not pronounced the way it would be in English, though it still causes enough problems with language filters and people making assumptions about pronunciation.
(There are plenty of words that sound exactly the same as f-ck and c-nt, but are spelled differently just in various European languages: Dutch “kunt” for can, French “phoque” or seal, Romanian “fac” for “I,” there’s a Czech expression that sounds like “fuck yo”. Swedish alone has a ton of false cognates - fack, sex, puss, cock, prick, bra, fart, slut… a Swedish friend once asked if someone had a tire pump, but failing to immediately think of the English word, assumed she’d be understood in Swedish, and caused offense by asking a man if he had a “dick pump.” )
Then there’s all the words even in English that sound dirty, but aren’t, and often fall afoul of filters.
To be fair, most of those don’t mean anything in any language, because it turns out a huge number are based on a couple tattoo flash sheets that inexplicably became popular worldwide, that used made-up “Chinese” characters (either Roman characters designed to look like Hanzi, or a combination of malformed and partial Hanzi) associated with the characters of the English alphabet. So everyone who went to get a tattoo of “their name in Chinese” (or, even more inexplicably, “their initials in Chinese”), has gibberish on them.
5 Likes
