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Comment by pftburger | Hacker News Reader

Sorry what? Is this articles title really a vagina joke? Can we maybe rather not?

I understand the provocation, of course, but the problem with posts like this is that they duplicate what they denounce and end up creating what they're complaining about.

On HN it's important to not to react reflexively, but rather to pause long enough for one's reflective circuits to kick in [1]. Then one can assess what's actually going on instead of snapping to the grid of the nearest pattern-match. That lets one consider the options for making a valuable contribution.

In this case, a quick look makes clear that this is a serious article full of interesting historical material. It's true that there's (presumably) a crude double entendre in the title, but that's there for historical reasons. It's not gratuitous. Unless I missed something, the article doesn't exploit it, and indeed is entirely respectful of Miss Shilling.

Commenters here need to be reflective enough to handle that sort of distinction. It's not difficult, if you're playing in the key of curiosity, which is the intended spirit of this site [2, 3].

On HN, it's best to leave shallow provocations in place and respond to what's interesting. We generally edit shallow provocations out of titles to help with that. This case was an exception, because of the historical angle. We could have replaced that specific name with some euphemism that would be nicer for contemporary ears, but that would be anachronistic and, I think, anti-intellectual. We try not to be Bowdlers here [4].

What I did instead, with the help of a reader who emailed, was put the term in quotes and capitalize it—to try to convey that it's a name with a specific historical meaning—and rely on the intellectual maturity of the readers for the rest. The latter is not always the best bet, but it worked out pretty well in this thread.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

As I said below.... double entendres, very common in Britain, appear to cause those in the West Coast US to panic for fear of being perceived sexist. In Britain (home of the panto [1]), we just smile childishly...... and maybe add a 'fnarr fnarr' for good measure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantomime#Performance_conventi...

Double-entendres are as English as Big Ben. Even in the most prudish of eras, it's just been a staple of their artistic production, all the way from Shakespeare's times. Occasionally I listen to '60s entertainment shows from BBC Radio and they are so full of them that the average American would probably consider it "blue" material today, let alone decades ago.

> Double-entendres are as English as Big Ben.

Undoubtedly.

Its probably also worth pointing out to our American audience that the beauty of double entendres is that any "blue" meaning is clearly in the mind of those hearing them, nowhere else!

After all "Miss Shillings Orifice" is simply a carburettor part named after Miss Shilling. Any association with bodily orifices (and that one in particular) is in the mind of the listener who should hang their head in shame for having such a dirty mind :-) What *would* your mother think!

I would like to point out to the casual reader from elsewhere that the comments in this thread refer to a Britain of the past. A nation's sense of humour evolves rather quickly.

Britain is still very much like this, outside London.

Last I checked, pantomimes show no sign of becoming unpopular in Britain :-)

You got me looking for pantomime statistics in recent years :) Perhaps they're hard to find or perhaps I didn't try very hard, but the best I could come up with was this from 2013:

> Terri Paddock, Managing and Editorial Director of WhatsOnStage, commented: "In general, we're seeing fewer pantomimes mounted in recent years. As of today, we're listing 125 pantomimes in our nationwide database for this Christmas as compared with a peak in 1996 of 244.

https://www.whatsonstage.com/england-theatre/news/panto-stat...

My kid's primary school takes them every year (covid excepted) to a panto, and we as a family go to our local am-dram panto. Annecdotaly that village panto has half a dozen shows and is always packed.

The former is a professional show - although 125 just for professional seems low given that I know of at least 3 professional pantos within 10 miles of my house which covers a population of about 100k population

Professional UK panto income increased 30% from 2012 to 2016 with about 3 million people watching a professional one each year - about 1 in 20 people.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...

Dunno how english Big Ben is. It was built in a made-up architectural style because it was supposed to be 'english' but england didn't really have much of an architectural culture.

Also dunno about double-entendre. Seems a little bit depressing to me that a woman struggles through sexism to provide a life-saving invention then it ends up getting made into a vagina joke.

For the record, am English.

> Dunno how english Big Ben is. It was built in a made-up architectural style

Ummmm

Big Ben is the bell in the Elizabeth Tower. It was made in the Whitechapel bell foundry and could not be more English!

> a woman struggles through sexism to provide a life-saving invention then it ends up getting made into a vagina joke.

The joke is that the joke is wholly [1] in the dirty mind of the listener. I find it very odd having to explain this to somebody from the UK.

[1] Fnarr Fnarr!

While people in england do make a lot more jokes than people elsewhere, the average sense of humour is no better.

Not only could it not be more English, but it couldn't be more distinctively English. It's the only bell in the world that sounds quite like that, due to the fact that they hit it with too big a hammer in September 1859, and had to cut a hole around the resulting crack to stop it spreading.

Unless you think of another country when you look at the clock hosted in a tower named after an English Queen that only exists in the English capital, or when you hear his distinctive gong that happens to introduce several broadcasts originating from such capital, I’d say Big Ben is pretty English, whether you appreciate it or not. But I’m sure opinions on this are divided. /s

It’s also sad that you cannot appreciate an intelligent form of art that is not, in itself, sexist. There are plenty of plays, films, and tv series, where the double-entendre is “pushed” by women (x) , and there are plenty of women who thoroughly enjoy the practice (x) (I’d argue most, but maybe I just move in working-class circles). I’m sure that, if you dig in the annals of engineering, sooner or later you’ll find something nicknamed after penis jokes. Is that sad? It’s just humans being humans.

(X) fnarr fnarr!

There's nothing more german than oktoberfest, nothing more american than wearing a pair of star-spangled-banner trousers while shooting an assault rifle at a bald-headed eagle, and nothing more british than 'elisabeth tower'[1], named after a woman who's entire family tree consisted of french people that hanged a lot of english peasants.

That and the picture of Lord Kitchener, maybe with a cup of tea and a really shit cupcake.

[1] PS: I can see it's very authentically english that everybody corrected me on this. I can just imagine the conversation at a pub, with me trying to work out how to escape through methods short of suicide.

> a woman who's entire family tree consisted of french people

Actually, a woman whose family tree is almost entirely composed of German, Dutch, and Scandinavian people. No doubt they hanged quite a few English peasants too, after being literally invited to rule over the country; but, you know, pedantry and all that.

I understand the sentiment, but I would counter: there is nothing more British than turning something utterly non-British into a symbol of britishness (fancy some tea?), so trying to measure purity in this field is not very productive.

I'd say that Britain never really had a nationalist movement, because it had its anti-monarchist revolution before nations really existed, and basically became an empire at the same moment in time. So there was never really a great drive to invent a unifying British identity (compared to, say, 'Frenchness' or 'Germanness') - past the stuff that people sell to tourists, like red buses and policemen that let pregnant women piss in their helmets.

So since the empire collapsed after WW2, everybody has been casting around for some kind of identity, more and more frantically as more and more bits of the empire have sloughed off. Since Brexit, it's got a bit weird, with all politicians making all statements in front of massive union jacks, and I expect it will get weirder still when Scotland leaves.

Hopefully, the national conversation will arrive at the conclusion that heterogeneity is no bad thing, and we should simply devolve power (cultural as well as economic) to a local level rather than trying to enforce a kind of Disneyfied Boris-Johnson style 'Britishness' on everybody, but I'm not holding my breath.

I disagree. There used to be a very distinctive British identity, mostly associated with English upper-class ideals. The lower classes were periodically coopted into this identity, either after the industrial revolution that triggered mass-education or during periodic conflicts, and their aspirations were then pushed outward to colonize “inferior” people. This is how the British empire was built, and it definitely was nationalistic in outlook.

Of course, the mechanism eventually broke, because of the slaughter of WW1 put the lie to the dream and the rise of continent-sized superpowers put it materially out of reach. Since then, coopting lower classes into upper-class ideals has been unfeasible. A replacement emerged in the heyday of socialist movements (everyone eating the same food, working in the same factories), but then died off, as that way of life also disappeared. What followed is not homogeneous, I agree on that, but I think you’re discounting the strength of what was there before.

A vagina joke made in the 40s, that's part of WW2's history.

Wait until you find out what the Dambusters called their dog.

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