Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dotancohen 323 days ago
Serious question. Am I completely old-fashioned for not expecting the word ass to appear in a professional article? Am I, a mature professional, not the target audience for this laptop or for this article? Who else would such a laptop be targeted at?
4 comments
diggan 323 days ago
For context:

> The other audible quirk is the ThinkBook’s “you’re doing it wrong” alarm: If you start closing the lid with the screen extended, or you move the screen while it’s rolling, the laptop emits a high-pitched tone. It’s the most 90s-motherboard-ass thing I’ve heard in a long time, but I find its needling sound oddly charming.

Would I expect to read this in a corporate press release? Not really. Would I expect to find some author trying to be a bit funny in a Verge article? Probably. Is it borderline offensive? I don't think so, wouldn't even think about it unless I read this comment first.

link
aidenn0 323 days ago
> It’s the most 90s-motherboard-ass thing I’ve heard in a long time

I'm not really bothered by the profanity, but WTF does "90s-motherboard-ass" even mean as a modifier for a noun?

link
dotancohen 323 days ago
As someone who actually was putting components on motherboards in the '90s, and even had replaced some capacitors on motherboards in the '90s, I see I'm not the target audience for the article at least. He probably should have saved the profanity for an analogy that his target audience could relate to.
link
rs186 323 days ago
You can be sure you won't ever see this word in nytimes, WSJ or even CNET, but the Verge is not one of them (and to my understanding, founded partly because the founders didn't want to be part of legacy media).
link
Mountain_Skies 323 days ago
The Fuddruckers sequence in Idiocracy comes to mind. Beyond the mainstreaming of what was previously perceived as profanity, it also seems that punctuation and capitalization are slowly on their way out.
link
volemo 323 days ago
I mean, Verge is entertainment, not some academically inclined publishing house. And IMHO the word "ass" has long lost its weight as an offensive or even a "strong" one. It's just ass — we all have 'em. :-)
link