[romanoderoma]

Scala means ladder in Italian and Sega means handjob

The French Word fiche means casino token and has been popularized by American Casinos and movies, yet in Italian it reads fike and it's a quite vulgar slur which literally means vaginas but it's used to say "nice looking girls"

It's the plural of fica, which sounds exactly like the Swedish fika, that means coffee break

You can imagine how that sound for an Italian to be offered a fika

Lumia means prostitute in Spanish

BTW a preservative in French is a condom...

The world does not speak English as a native language

Edit: but, as usual, judging from the immediate downvote Americans won't accept that they are only 5% of the World population...

[bhrgunatha]

> Lumia means prostitute in Spanish

I had a few Spanish friends while I lived in Australia who found The Mitsubishi Pajero hilarious.

It seems really odd to me that it's still named that considering that Spanish is so widely spoken.

https://translate.google.com/?hl=en#view=home&op=translate&s...

[pilaf]

It actually got renamed to Mitsubishi Montero for the Latin American market.

[m4rtink]

Do not ever try to say you are going to search something or someone in Polish if there are any Czech speakers nearby - the results might be surprising.

[kelnos]

The open source world, by and large, uses English as its lingua franca. Of course we're well aware that sometimes commonplace words in one language can mean something offensive in another language.

But I think it highly likely that the original developers of the GIMP knew exactly what it meant in English and probably chose the name because of its English meaning, as a joke that may have been funny in geek circles back then, but now we realize is just in poor taste. (I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they were probably more targeting the sexual connotations of "gimp" and weren't making fun of physically disabled people.)

The downvotes are likely because it seems like you have an axe to grind about English being the de facto common language of the internet, not because people think you don't have a good point to make or because of some silly nationalistic reason.

[romanoderoma]

I have no problem with English

I speak Italian as native language, for me GIMP is just a name, like the BALKARP IKEA sofa, I consider it a bunch of letter stuck together that represent something, but don't mean anything and if they sound like something real, it doesn't really matter.

I also speak English, Spanish, some French, some German

Of course I would never call my product "ugly bitch" but of course I wouldn't also call it pizza

And yet Martin Odersky language before Scala was named pizza

I wouldn't call it merda (it means shit, in the worst possible way)

There's an American band called black merda (in Italian it translates as black shit) they used it because it sound like murder in English

You have to understand that English is not the Lingua franca of anything, at best English spoken by non native English people is

You have to accept that speaking someone else's language doesn't mean you have to accept every cultural issue that people born with it might have

Photoshop is as ridiculous as gimp and I would never take seriously a software in Italian that is called "negozio di foto" from a company called "addobbo" for the operating system "finestre" or "mela"

It's something that would make me think of the kindergarten

But I accept it, ridiculous as they sound, because they are just brands, you get used to it and live on

GIMP is the best of the lotto because it means GNU image manipulation program, it's the most professional name of them all

And GNU is not the animal, is an acronym

If English people have a problem with their language, it's not a global problem

and btw, what all of you are getting wrong by supporting this infinite rant on the name of this particular program that come out every single time it is mentioned, is that the name is GIMP the all uppercase acronym not gimp the noun

Like IBM or IKEA or SKYPE or YAHOO (yes, they are all acronyms, funny that nobody seems to have anything to say about the professionalism of a software whose name is pronounced "sky pee" while billionaire CEOs use it and refer to it all the time...)

It's a GNU tradition to use them

Only who knows nothing about GNU and free software could find it offensive

[noisem4ker]

IBM: International Business Machines

IKEA: Ingvar Kamprad (the founder's name), Elmtaryd (the farm where the founder grew up), and Agunnaryd (the founder's hometown)

Skype: SKY PEer-to-peer

Yahoo: Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle

[zapzupnz]

I’m down voting because of that very reason, yes. And the needless edits to complain about the down votes; this isn’t reddit.

[romanoderoma]

BTW we don't say "mamma mia" so much, in that way, maybe you should check what you think of other cultures, before getting offended for a software using the name GIMP

So the edit, yeah, was to prove a point: Americans can't accept that their culture is meaningless globally and their puritans problems have no significance for 95% of the World population.

This isn't Reddit, I known this is a circle jerk of people thinking they are better than redditors just because it's what you are supposed to think here.

On Reddit at least people don't downvote you without commenting on why

[zapzupnz]

> maybe you should check what you think of other cultures, before getting offended for a software using the name GIMP

I have no idea what that has to do with my comment, I didn't say anything about that.

But even so, how does one offensive stereotype mean that something else, also offensive, should be dismissed as non-stereotypical?

If you feel so strongly about "mamma mia", then you should have no problem with other people feeling strongly about the implications of 'GIMP', regardless of its origin (which you haven't mentioned once; it's a film reference).

If you don't feel that strongly about people saying "mamma mia" as an Italian stereotype, naturally you would have no particular interest in GIMP. So why the passion and derision for those who do care?

I know why.

To throw in a cheap shot at Americans.

Disclaimer: I'm not American.

> Edit: but, as usual, judging from the immediate downvote Americans won't accept that they are only 5% of the World population...

> Americans can't accept that their culture is meaningless globally and their puritans problems have no significance for 95% of the World population

Your vitriol against Americans, as though anybody expressing an opinion with which you don't agree and speaks English must be American, speaks more to me about your position on this matter than anything else.

That's one reason I downvoted your comment.

> This isn't Reddit, I known this is a circle jerk of people thinking they are better than redditors just because it's what you're supposed to think here.

Actually, no. The reason I mentioned that this isn't reddit is because we have a set of community guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Second guideline from the bottom: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

Because yeah, people getting upset about downvotes is dull. Moreso when it includes a needless dig at our users and American friends.

That's another reason I downvoted your comment.

> On Reddit at least people don't downvote you without commenting on why

Actually, they do. It's a well-known problem that people don't just downvote for content that they think is inappropriate or irrelevant, as per reddit's guidelines, but rather downvote content or comments with which they don't agree.

Heck, that was the motivation for hiding actual vote numbers a few years back. It's a known problem.

Besides, people on HN do tend to comment because constructive argumentation is generally encouraged by the community guidelines. So long as it leads somewhere.

[romanoderoma]

> If you feel so strongly about "mamma mia", then you should have no problem with other people feeling strongly about the implications of 'GIMP', regardless of its origin (which you haven't mentioned once; it's a film reference

Pffff

That's some heavy twisting of my words

Or some kind of cognitive dissonance

I don't feel anything about "mamma mia", I feel that the people that invented a false stereotype, which is also offensive to many, because it's not representative of Italians just like Nazis are not representative of Germans, has no right to feel offended by something that is their own creation.

Stephen Frey gave the perfect definition of this behaviour

> It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what.

I pointed to Americans because they are the only ones who constantly whine about everything, not knowing that they are a very very very small part of the World population and their whines are insignifcant

They really can't understand it

Either because they are dumb or assholes is yet to be determined, but it's a fact.

Constantly lamenting that GIMP is offensive on every thread about GIMP or GTK or even something not directly related like someone posts "have you ever tried GIMP" or "that could be solved with some GIMP-FU", while it is actually not a problem for billion of people, is so annoying that I wish Colombo stayed home sick that day he left for the Indias.

> Actually, they do. It's a well-known problem that people don't just downvote for content that they think is inappropriate or irrelevant

That's because the majority of Reddit users read subreddits where the majority of commenters are American

It's just a bias towards the platform given by the fact that the majority of its userbase comes from the same country with the heavy social issues I was talking about fee paragraphs before.

I don't hang out with American redditors anymore, I only read subreddits of things I like that are not of interest to American general population and my opinion of Reddit completely changed

I also met a lot of Americans there who share this sentiment on their country and are sad of the state of the things, just we were when Berlusconi was an important politcal leader

HN, on the other hand, can't change because there's only one HN and you can't make your own sub HN