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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

This one was weird as it's saying that English has ownership over sounds. If it sounds similar to a bad English word then it's also bad, even if context is given.

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Magical thinking at its best. The Middle Ages are back. You are not allowed to pronounce anything similar to the powerful incantation, lest the demons emerge. Regardless of context.

Of course, in practice, the demons are regular people with stones in their hands ...

So videoconference calls are modern seances ("Is anyone there?", "Can you hear me?"...), you tweet of the Devil and He doth retweets, ...

... we've managed to turn magic and superstition into reality, just not in a way we expected.

This is a very funny perspective, thank you :-)

Or, and this might be something to consider: this restructuring of of culture into groups of "good and bad culture" is something that happens each generation. Like the hippies against the old ideals, the 80 kids/punkers against the hippies, the smooth millennials against the 80-kids. Every generation did their own thing. We are getting old and do not subscribe to the new future. We are losing our childhood loves. They will disappear into the fold of history. Just like we will.

Historically, culture wasn't so quick to change. Typically, parents would be able to pass down their culture and traditions to children, instead of having society foist an entirely new culture onto their kids that's incompatible with what the parent grew up with.

This happened too many times in history to even name. I could sum some recent examples if you want. Do you want that?

Or as Shakespeare put it, "The Hell is empty and all the devils are here."

Voldemort!

This is the actual reason that the company I work for decided to standardise on “denylist” rather than “blocklist”...

I thought "blocklist" was the replacement for "blacklist".

Yup, try using the words niggle and niggardly in a public setting.

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