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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

Really? Oracle actually makes a lot of sense to me for a database name (in the 'source of truth' sense, not in the prophet sense).

Mongo, on the other hand, has definitely always had the racist/ablist slur as the first connotation for me.

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I've learned almost all the slurs I know from comments or media sources complaining about them. It's the only place they're used in polite society.

Then perhaps count yourself lucky to not have had some of these used against you.

It isn't really a surprise in this case since both ethnic Mongolians and those with Downs syndrome are not in many Americans' social circles.

"Almost all" does sound like a bit of a surprise, but thinking back on it the only one I know for a fact I heard for the first time outside of a corrective context was my elder uncles friends who enjoyed self-depreciating jokes, usually with slurs for eastern Europeans in them. I first heard those as a child and only realized years later they were offensive. Most others, I think, I honestly have no idea when i was first exposed to them.

Mongo and mongol don't have a close relationship: the final syllable is entirely different.

It's implied that someone is going around calling people with Down's syndrome "Mongos." "Mongol" is an actual non-offensive[0] word which means, unsurprisingly, someone who can trace their lineage back to the area around Mongolia.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongols (If it's used descriptively on Wikipedia, it's probably not considered offensive.)

Mongol is not (as far as I am aware) an offensive word. Mongoloid[0] (which "mongo" is a shortened form of) in reference to people with Down Syndrome, definitely is.

My pet theory is that the database is named after a character in "Blazing Saddles", and I want to be able to store candy in it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_syndrome#Name

This says more about you than the baseline.

I always thought it was a reference to valuable stuff picked from trash, which I understood to be slang from sanitation workers, but apparently that's local to the NYC area.

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