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Comment by BoppreH | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunate name, "cu" it's the most well known slang for "anus" in Brazil (population: 200+ million). "Libcu++" is sure to cause snickering.

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It’s penis in Vietnamese (pop. 80M), I guess people don’t really care since tech language is usually English

"cu" is a pretty common prefix for CUDA libraries. cuBLAS, cuTENSOR, CUTLASS, CUB, etc.

It gets worse if you try to spell libcu++ without pluses:

libcuxx libcupp (I didn't hate this one but my team disliked it).

We settled on `libcudacxx` as the alphanumeric-only spelling.

These things never seem to matter even in English. How many times have you heard someone say “I don’t like Microsoft”, followed by “that’s what she said”.

That joke appears in a lot of Microsoft memes though. Not sure if posting some is appropriate here. Probably not.

cu is, or was back in the day, a standard Unix utility (call up) — connect to another machine via modem.

It doesn’t appear to be in Ubuntu any more but still in openbsd, netbsd, and macos!

You can’t win win these namespace collisions: I have friends whose names are obscenities in other languages I speak.

Wait until you see the namespace the standard library is under.

Although maybe short words that are slang in languages different from what something was written in aren't a big deal.

"CU" is also an abbreviation of "see you". I don't think it causes much awkwardness, but I could be wrong.

As a Brazilian, I can confirm that we chuckle whenever we see someone use that word :)

This only affects developers. Limited scope.

Wasn't there something related about Microsoft Lumia phones?

cf. the Vauxhall Nova car

"No va" means "doesn't go" in Spanish.

Also Hyundai Kona, "cona" means "cunt" or "pussy" in Portuguese.

Wow, Kona Bikes [0] must have a fun time in Portugal then..

[0] https://konaworld.com/

I wonder how kona coffee sells over there.

I think it's unlikely that Spanish speakers would have been confused about the word "nova" when used as a car name. In Spanish "nova" describes the same astronomical event we call a "nova" in English: a new light in the sky. Additionally Spanish "nuevo" and English "new" seem to share the same root. My point is these words all mean similar things to English- and Spanish-speaking car buyers.

Customers either didn't make that association or didn't care: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chevrolet-nova-name-spanis...

Unix users have "cu". Do "man cu", if you are curious. I haven't played with "cu" since the UUCP email era. Good times.

Doesn't exist on my system, but is at https://linux.die.net/man/1/cu

Or how Siri means "buttocks" in Japanese?

It’s oshiri, not Siri.

Actually the 'o' is a modifier for politeness. It seems there's a version of the word without an 'o'.

https://jisho.org/search/shiri

I'm aware... But the word isn't pronounced the same anyway, and I've never heard it used without the o either.

Do chemists have similar problems working with copper, whose chemical symbol is Cu?

Probably not. I heard a few jokes during high school and that's it. Not even that funny. I remember my class had a lot more fun with iron(II) hydroxide: when the compound's name is pronounced in portuguese it sounds like the teacher is threatening to screw over two students.

In all honesty, out of the combinations for two and three letter acronyms there’s bound to be a language out the there where the meaning is crude. I recall on here recently, something being rude in Finnish or Swedish. We’re professionals, it’s just a name, who cares.

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