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Comment by jay_kyburz | Hacker News Reader

Can we stop calling these people "Karen". I'm sure its very hurtful to all the people actually called Karen. We tread so carefully around race and LGBTQI issues, but all of a sudden its OK to start labeling entitled assholes "Karen". I don't get it. We don't need a new word for it.

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Guys have been called “dick” forever now. Words like “Karen” provide a very clear mental image of a specific type of “asshole.”

That's dick, though, not Dick.

I do feel like we shouldn't attach that to a real name that real people have, but instead use actual words like "entitled asshole" that convey the same meaning without lumping in unrelated people who so happen to share the name who have done nothing bad to anyone.

> but instead use actual words like "entitled asshole"

I always think "douchebag" is quite good for this. You can really pile quite a lot of emphasis onto that first syllable for maximal invective effect.

> That's dick, though, not Dick.

The origin of "dick" is, nevertheless, the name "Dick". Would you be satisfied if we went from "Karen" to "karen"?

Honestly? I'd rather avoid both. It's not nice to do that to people who are unrelated to the entitled assholes.

I dont fully disagree, nor do I think anyone should purposely seek to make anyone feel badly. But at some point can we just bust someones balls/ovaries/whatever they identify as having and maybe have a laugh? If everything is an egregious offense then nothing is...

There’s a difference between a friend “busting your balls/ovaries/whatever” and having a laugh with you vs. a 13 year old redditor calling women they don’t like Karen.

Of course there is! The problem is not with the Karen meme though... Social media dehumanizing interaction (at least for some significant part of the online population) is the problem.

I sort of understand where you are coming from but my name is Jon and I'm British. Jon, here, is short for Jonathan.

I'm aware that John is an Americanism for the bog (toilet/WC.) John Doe is a person whose name is unknown in the US. A rubber johnny is just one nickname for a prophylactic. My mum used to call me Jonny or Johann or even Johannes as a sign of affection.

I'm not so sure that Karens are offended by the term Karen. You see, very few Karens are actually Karens.

I don't see why we need to create a new derogatory term using a persons name. It's not even very descriptive.

People didn't start calling a toilet Jon because they wanted a label for the sterotype of an entitled asshole.

I guess its a form of virtue signaling. You have to be cool and know meems to know what calling somebody a Karen even means.

Why do you feel that you need to be able to see the point of it for it to be ok or non-offensive? Maybe you don’t see the point of it, but others see their own point and don’t have to justify it.

Should every possible characteristic a living entity can have also be a protected class?

It's also quite sexist. There's no equivalent male name that is anywhere as popular. Yet there's certainly many older entitled guys.

Would you like to propose an alternative? I think it's a great term.

I guess your wife/sister/girlfriend/etc probably isn't named Karen.

My wife's name is Karen, and I've teased her about it over the past 6 months and she's kept mum about it.

She finally admitted to me that it gets on her nerves greatly and she resents all of it. It came as quite a shock to me (because I find I lot of it funny) but I suspect there are a lot of Karens out there that aren't amused.

The kiddos and I have now resorted to calling her "K-Dog" which she gets a kick out of.

I suspect that anyone who's caught grief for their name wouldn't be surprised. We (generally) don't choose our names, and yet it's imbued with a lot of our sense of identity.

I have a name that has been relentlessly mocked for the last 36 years. The suggestion by others to me has always been “if you don’t like people mocking your name, change it”.

So, I’d say the same applies. If people called Karen don’t like the new association with their name, they can change their name.

Otherwise, sticks and stones.

Also, they’re not the ones actually being mocked here - I get grief from grown-ass adults over my name, directed at me - so frankly, I think anyone named Karen who sees this as a personal attack needs to either get over it, or change their name.

It's kind of racist/sexist. Pretty obviously such.

I'm not personally offended but I am bothered by the casual double standard.

Entitled men are beginning to be called Kevins, if that makes you feel any better.

If somebody is judging a person called Karen as being "a Karen" just because of her name, then that is the problem, not the word. If you judge a person called Christian as being of the Christian faith then you're weird and stop doing it. Is Greg gregarious? Is Mohammed Ali a prophet? We really just need to stop judging people for bad reasons instead of dumbing down language.

The whole political correctness idea isn't internally consistent anyway so you can't expect new concepts or words to be "correctly" fitted into it. It's just an arbitrary political ideology for people to latch onto.

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