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Comment by xanderlewis | Hacker News Reader

Yes! So I’ve read. But since he’s not British I’ve always wondered whether he completely understood the feel of the the word and quite how weird it sounds (to those not already used to it).

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Why wouldn't he? It's not like British culture is totally impenetrable. Any European over 35 will have ingested a lot of British television reruns over the course of the eighties and nineties. While that won't allow for every nuance, the word 'git' certainly is used in its proper context often enough.

Well, no culture is totally impenetrable with enough exposure/effort. I just wondered how much exposure he had. His English is obviously (beyond) native level but I do feel the subtlety of British English expressions are frequently lost. [*] Europeans, despite their relative geographic and cultural proximity, rarely seem to get British humour and expressions. American culture dominates these days anyway, no matter what you learnt in school.

For example, I wonder if he would have thought it was too far to call it ‘prick’?

Knowing Linus, perhaps not!

[*] (Not because there’s more subtlety than in any other culture/language; all locales have their own unique usages that are hard to truly understand unless you’ve lived there. I’m not claiming there’s anything mythical or unique about BE.)

He's Finnish. Most of the English-second-language speaking world learns British English, so I'd expect that he definitely understood the word.

> I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First 'Linux', now 'Git'".

It seems he knew, but I can say I never learned "git" in school.

>British English

Academia it's just a few years long. After that... the 90% of the media it's American English.

I haven’t met many Finns, but the Swedes I’ve met seem to have learnt most of their English from watching American television and YouTubers. Knowing a word isn’t the same as having a lifetime of hearing it in varying contexts.

It's reasonable to assume that he knew the Monty Python reference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLlv_aZjHXc&t=70s

As a non Brit, what is the feel of the word? Is it like having a site named IdiotHub?

More like AssholeHub. But not so rude.

They're exaggerating. It's a very casual insult, often used playfully

I thought so when I was younger, but I’ve found that it’s often considered worse than words like ‘idiot’ or ‘twit’. Some seem to find it — to my surprise — not just insulting, but crude.

In the 00s there was a popular wine called "old git". It generally means someone grumpy and cantankerous, but in a playful way (otherwise you'd just call them a c***). So it makes sense for a self-effacing joke about Linus Torvalds.

This is true. But I think there’s a surprising difference between calling someone ‘an old git’ / ‘a jammy git’ / ‘a grumpy git’ / … and simply calling them ‘a git’. The latter seems quite a lot harsher and less likely to be a joke.

Maybe from Monty Python. Programmers love python.

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