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I had the same reaction, coming from the perspective of an adult doing paying work. If your engineers can't use a language called Coq without creating a hostil
by dkarl 6y ago
I had the same reaction, coming from the perspective of an adult doing paying work. If your engineers can't use a language called Coq without creating a hostile environment, you have a much bigger problem with how they behave around people named Wang, Dong, Mount, or Kuntz. You urgently need to fix that problem.
But, on reading the discussion page, I realized I forgot about kids and students, especially women, and in that context, even though changing the name is obviously not the best or most important way to solve the problem, it could be a great mitigation and is worth doing.
- threatofrain 6y agoSo how should women and kids deal with Dr Dong? Would it make sense to metaphorically pull Dr Dong out and offer some friendly advice about changing their name, one with a better culture fit?
- dkarl 6y agoChildren will deal with it badly, of course. That's why it is a mitigation, not a solution. Unnecessarily creating opportunities for the problem to manifest will not result in the problem being solved more quickly; it will only increase the damage from it.
- cbfrench 6y agoOr, to use a personal example: My pediatrician was Dr. Raper. To my recollection, the rather infelicitous nature of his last name never came up in conversation among his patients, although I’m sure the oddity of it crossed some minds...
- true_religion 6y agoNot a doctor, but I changed my name in college because even if people are too adult to make fun of the name, they still get an awkward look on their face. Also, professors struggled to mispronounce my name in order to make it sound less lewd to their English speaking ears.
- thefz 6y agoSo the whole world has to bend to the US's language/culture. What about the other way, when american words sound offensive in other languages?
- matt-attack 6y agoThe Chevy Nova was famous for its interpretation by Mexicans. In Mexico it means “doesn’t go” which is a less than ideal name for a car.
- waterhouse 6y agoIf it's true that you can detect bad actors by seeing them persistently make inappropriate jokes about Coq in the workplace, then might it actually be a good thing to have something named Coq? Because you can detect them and deal with them early before they do something worse than make dumb jokes. If that works, that sounds useful enough that one might consider deliberately giving something a funky name. Following that train of thought, given that kids will eventually encounter something that makes them giggle, mightn't it be good for them to do that and get used to being "professional" as early as possible? (Though there's probably an age below which getting them to stop giggling wouldn't work at all.) Last, considering the case of a male professor that makes sexual innuendo towards female students as a come-on... I don't know how these things work, but is it possible that this would make it easier for the girls to figure out that he's "creepy" and someone they should avoid (possibly even giving him a reputation they learn about before meeting him), thus reducing the likelihood that he's in a position to do something worse? In fact, given today's neopuritan colleges, it seems likely that him doing that might in itself get him fired; or at least it could put him on thin ice, to be more immediately condemned if students start accusing him of doing worse things. I don't know if the above scenarios would actually happen that way. But I do suspect that the people arguing to get the name removed haven't thought through second-order effects like those.