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Comment by spankalee | Hacker News Reader

Great. It's just a terrible name for a project that presumably hopes a broad range of people will use.

Even if you buy that the creators didn't know it was an ugly term for disabled people (but why did they think the Gimp character was called that in Pulp Fiction?), naming your potentially mainstream software after a imprisoned, tortured, and eventually murdered sex slave maybe isn't the best idea either?

If you want your project to remain niche and repel some users, then I guess it's a fine choice, however.

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> (but why did they think the Gimp character was called that in Pulp Fiction?

Pleading ignorance here... When I saw Pulp Fiction as a teenager, and they refer to the BDSM guy as "the gimp", I thought that's what they called that outfit. I feel like it was a not-uncommon understanding in the US (even if an erroneous one)... All my friends and I at school referred the the character Voldo from Soul Calibur as "that creepy guy in the gimp suit":

https://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/ssb-tourney/images/f/fb...

We didn't mean it in the sense that he was crippled (he's actually quite agile), we meant it in the sense that he was wearing tight leather with bindings and zippers.

> naming your potentially mainstream software after a imprisoned, tortured, and eventually murdered sex slave maybe isn't the best idea either?

Honest question: Why?

I never liked the name either, you are pretty dramatic about it though. Gimp is niche and the name is not the reason for it being so.

The word "gimp" existed long before that film was made.

Of course; no one said otherwise.

The Pulp Fiction context is a [imo, poor] defense of the name from the original team - saying that's where they picked it from, as opposed to the ableist slur. It was the mid-90s at the time, after all, and there was an Uma Thurman Pulp Fiction poster in half the dorm rooms in the damned country at the time.

So, now we're back to the comment you're responding to: even if it is genuinely just about Pulp Fiction, is that any better?

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