[tholman]

Am I missing something, or is "kwon-artist" a racism-style play on words much like say, "kung-flu"? Cmon...

_edit_ ~ Sounds like I'm wrong here by the general sentiment, was taught not to use name's as puns :(

[tbk-1]

I mean it's just a play on words. His name is Kwon, and kwon-artist sounds like con artist.

[goindeep]

Thank you.

[coconut08]

that is some serious gymnastics you are doing to make this out to be racist.

[dtn]

It's not inherently racist, but I would conjecture that these puns occur more frequently with Asian names (unfortunate spellings are pretty popular e.g. Phuc, Bich, Wang, etc. despite pronunciation being completely different). One factor is probably due to their rarity in comparison to Anglo names.

It results in terribly tasteless, low-brow "jokes" such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaOkTKfxu44

[baggy_trough]

Have you heard of puns before?

[anm89]

Are you implying that it is inherently racist to call a Korean person by their name?

[woodruffw]

I think it's manifest that they aren't implying that. They said directly that the pun is the part they found objectionable.

[anm89]

I think it's manifest that they are. This person doesn't find puns as a linguistic tool to be offensive. Their angle is that the use of a Korean name to address a Korean person with that name makes this pun racist.

If I made a pun about a guy named John is that racist? The only way that could be justified is if you somehow think it's shameful to be named John for some weird racial reason.

[woodruffw]

I’m not interested in a factual dispute over what the GP claimed. I’m only pointing out that they clearly took issue with the pun, and not the name itself.

[anm89]

The pun is the name. What else in the pun is there to be offended by except the name itself? I would seriously like to understand this.

[8f2ab37a-ed6c]

Literally not a single person except for you looked at it from that angle. Why stoke the fire?

[sbisker]

The headline struck me as unusually crass for HN even before I saw the parent comment. I was a bit surprised it wasn’t rewritten. So, I guess I’m a second person.

Maybe it’s generational, but I was taught to avoid using names in puns. I definitely grew up with people who would make last name puns like this to put undue emphasis on race.

If folks doesn’t even see why that would be a problem these days, I’ll take it as a win for society - but I think the question was in good faith.

[klyrs]

Yep. Making fun of "foreign" names is casual xenophobia. The fact that it's a pun doesn't excuse it. More generally, making fun of people's names is intellectual laziness and unprofessional at the very least.

[kortilla]

It’s not making fun of it, it’s using it exactly as it exists.

“Bernie Madoff with my money”.

[unsupp0rted]

I had the same reaction as you. Not that it's "crass" or "racist" or any other particular -ist or -ic, just that it adds nothing and seems like a childish pun attached to a serious story.

[silisili]

I don't think it's racist at all, that word gets overused so much that I can understand the reaction to the question.

That out of the way, I generally agree that it's poor taste. I was taught not to poke fun at things people didn't choose and can't change - their smile, laugh, handicaps, color, name, etc. Low hanging fruit, and potentially really devastating to people.