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Comment by woliveirajr | Hacker News Reader

Once upon a time, in Brazil, there was a campaign about STDs. They decided to call the male genitalia as "Braulio". That name become ruined forever.

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You don't see a lot of American kids named Dick anymore.

The best version is of course Dick Pick, creator of the Pick operating system (not joking).

who created the GIRLS [0]. Oh my, we surely [1] live in a simulation played by a teenager.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system#History [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane!

Dick is just a nickname for Richard, so I guess all Richards are Dicks?

In February this year I met a guy named Richard Head. No joke.

I knew a burner (Burning Man) that went by that moniker.

As a Richard, I resent that remark.

Good thing Dick Van Dyke wasn’t growing up today…

There's a story of a company that was selling a box to connect to your TV that'd take the closed captioning signal, and on detecting "vulgar" or "offensive" language, it'd bleep out the sound and replace the captions with something less offensive.

Supposedly an early version would bleep out Dick van Dyke and replace it with Jerk Van Gay.

The jokes about Dick Van Dyke's name are very old (but usually they use Penis Van Lesbian), so it was quite likely just a variant used by the company itself as a PR sound-bite to get people to write about them. It seems like it worked - it appeared in quite a lot of news stories and some are still online:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-nov-25-ca-47459...

https://www.chicagotribune.com/1999/03/01/v-chip-be-darned/

I've never used one, but I have actually seen those boxes in real people's homes. They do exist.

Yes, to be clear I wasn't suggesting the boxes didn't exist, just that their "cute" story about their early problems was a bit close to a very, very old joke and seemed like it might well be intentional PR spin. The company is still around:

https://www.tvguardian.com/

Right, I was just confirming that they have been seen in the wild.

I also have doubts because I can't see their customer base ever being ok with the word "penis", regardless of whether it is a medical term. So I can't see them making that substitution in their dictionary. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if they outsourced it and only provided a list of words to substitute that was incomplete and left choosing the substitutions up to the dev.

These are two different substitutions.

The box, as described by vidarh, would turn "Dyke" into "Gay".

The "penis" one refers to a joke told by Mary Tyler Moore on Letterman back in 1993, https://youtu.be/vhAv8Aowb9w?t=413 .

Ahh, thanks. That makes more sense.

How old do you think he was when he first heard "Penis Van Lesbian"?

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyke_(slang) says the term "was used as a derogatory term for lesbians by straight people" by the 1950s, and is in a 1942 slang dictionary at https://archive.org/details/bwb_T5-BCF-927/page/374/mode/2up... . Since he was born in 1925, it seems possible that he encountered that term before he turned 18 in 1943.)

It’s not a bad name, or an extinct name, but it’s surely not common lately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Trickle

Lots of Dutch people called Dick Kok.

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