Lyft said their names are offensive. Candice Poon, Cara Dick, and Mike Finger disagree

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Dick Hertz is a bit miffed too.

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I suppose that he will prefer to get a car to a traditional rental company.

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Just wait until you find out that there were four Tory MPs who really were Bastards.



John Bastard was probably a Tory too, since everyone else in the family seemed to be.

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Friend’s uni wouldn’t give her an email address because her last name was Hiscock.

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As a coder myself, I think this is unlikely to have come from them. Someone higher up the chain like a business analyst would have initiated this,

I’ve always wondered if dick Butkis was a better football player because of his name. Just think of all the fights he probably had as a kid. Made him tough.

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You need a different video keyboard, if you’re using Android. Most actively try to steer you away from profanity with their suggestions but some do not.

I use Swiftkey and if I type “fu”, “fuck” is the first suggestion, based on my usage patterns ^^’ .

@Michael_R_Smith Perhaps, but it’s rather unlikely that anyone gave the coders a specific list of words, rather than simply telling them to eliminate troll/bogus/obscene names.

I actually knew a Mike Hunt. We used to blame him for troubles just to hear his name on the school loudspeakers.

Also:
Tragedy On The Cliffs by Eileen Dover
The Broken Chair by Eileen Bach
Tiger’s Revenge by Claude Balls

Also also:
My wife knew a couple with the last name of Hannah. Their first names were Herb and Anna. True story.

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Don’t forget Hugh Jorgen and Mike Easter.

Who (when this pic was taken) only had one eye.

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There’s an argument that naming your daughter Candy Poon might be child abuse. I’m sure middle school was hell.
My family name lends itself to rudeness too. We generally run prospective baby names past an obnoxious sixth grader before we go with them, so as to not make it too easy for the bullies in the kid’s future.

I wouldn’t call this a colonization issue. Insisting that a name be in Latin characters, that a father’s last name is the same as his children’s last names, that a name should have two or more components, and a lot of the other name fallacies as listed in the programmer’s list are colonization mindset mistakes (that every country follows your same naming conventions).

But there are a lot of people from the European-American cultures that have last names with a long history within this culture who get flagged as having problematic names too. I’ve known a lot of Poons, and many of them have been white. (I’ve also met Poons who are Black, and Poons who are Asian.) Many of the people in the article were people from European-American cultures.

(In College, I knew a guy named [Redacted]. He was a Pacific Islander. That was his complete name; his culture only uses one name; The university that I went to insisted that he should have two names, a first name and a last name. So his first name was obviously [Redacted]. His last name? [Redacted]; literally same name as his first. So the university printed out his ID as [Redacted], [Redacted].)

Don’t forget about ol’ Ben Dover and Jenny Zass…

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Could mister Phuque Yu pleas come to the customer service counter?

Hey, I knew her! She used to run with Pooky Wax. Amazing that they ended up starting a business together.

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Can someone explain why this name is funny beyond the “dick” part. Sorry if I’m really dense…

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“All the Dicks…”

So I guess it’s ok to have an offensive name if somebody else gives it to you but not if you give it to yourself? Lyft should have doubled down: if something is offensive, it’s offensive whether it’s made up or real.

Not to say it would have been right of them to do so. But at least it would have been logically consistent.

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Wait—aren’t all names made up? I mean, somebody made them up at some point, right??

I know someone who was given only two names (first and last), and their Minnesota Driver’s License reads “[Firstname] NMN [Lastname]”. (With “NMN” being, obviously, “No Middle Name”.)