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Comment by DonnieBurger | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's highly damaging. It's an acronym. Is BBC's name highly damaging?

You're laughing but when I worked on a search engine, it was a serious question which videos should we display if the search query is just "BBC".

The prudent approach prevailed for a hundred different reasons but online user metrics weren't one of them. Apparently people were not very fond of the British Broadcasting Corporation, especially outside of the angloshpere.

BBC isn't a great comparison - it's an initialism, not read or said as a word.

I can't think of an acronym example though.

And the embarrassing meaning that some might attribute to "BBC" is also an initialism.

Why would it be? I can't think of a single meaning of BBC which translates to an insult. GIMP on the other hand has more than one meanings as an insult (not even an acronym).

Uhhh BBC also stands for something else, and that second meaning is a very common term on the internet.

Describing one’s … favourite desert? (HN is American so not sure we can say the word here) doesn’t constitute an insult - people say it all the time irl. But you’re also right that BBC wouldn’t be a good name for a design tool either.

Naming things is hard, someone should setup a focus group :)

Are you thinking of the Coventry University Netball Team? (again).

Try this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_(sexual_slang)

Definitely came after the original BBC being established, and definitely is orders of magnitude less known than the sexual slang variant. So yeah, the Gimp comparison doesn't stand, at all.

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