The end of innocence

And so, I was innocently reading Altacylsmic's post: Big Log, which was about Blizz's failure to police some of the more offensive names.  He had a list.  I looked at that list and didn't understand why some names were offensive.  Naturally once I pronounced them out loud (like Mike Hunt) I realised that they were actually rather rude.  But one stumped me.  So I decided to ask in guild.

"Hey," I said.  "I don't understand this name.  It's supposed to be rude, but I don't get it."

"What is it?" asked someone in guild chat.

"Beefcurtains?"

There was a slight pause, and Nath and Jazz were laughing.  I think Aza was too?  And Dragon and Lom as well.

I was still bewildered.  OK, so it is something rude.

Dragonray took pity on me and whispered to me that it was a rude way of talking about unattractive labia. OHHH.  I get it now.  Gee, the weird names people come up with.

I also noticed that Pillock was on the bad list.  I thought that just meant an idiot.  I even looked it up in the dictionary.  But it apparently is a variant on penis, I guess penises are stupid people.

Anyway, so bewildered was I by this Beef curtains thing that I went to work and told the surgeon I work with about it.  Now you may find this rather odd, but it stems from his cultural background that Western slang terms are often lost upon him.  And rude words too.  For example, the C word which I find highly offensive, he had been USING it because he thought it was just another word for vagina.  And I was horrified because he just dropped the C bomb in conversation whilst we were doing an operation on that part of the body and I told him he couldn't say that an dhe asked why and when I told him he was embarrassed because nobody had ever told him that it was that offensive, he thought it was like saying willy or some other colloquial word.  So when I told him about this Beef curtains he was like "REALLY? People talk about that?" and my nurses who were middle aged were equally surprised.  Anyway, you learn something new every day I suppose.

However, I disagreed with Altaclysmic about the kinds of people using these names.  Sabrehawk, for example, who is a working professional (well I think bank managers are professional people!) with a wife and teenage kids who NEVER speaks any kind of sexist language or acts misogynistic in any way, has pets with the most dreadful names. I just thought it was because he's a man and he likes women private parts, like most males do.  And probably because it was funny to name his big cats after female genitalia because of the irony of the name.

I think people find genitalia and sex fascinating because it's a bit taboo.  Not many people get to see naked parts of others except in pornography or their partners. And probably because I see MANY naked people every day, that genitalia does not offend, nor does it fascinate me.  BUT WHY is it taboo.  You have to have genitalia to reproduce.  That's how we all got here.  That's how every animal on the earth gets here.

But I digress.  I think I actually don't want these people to get banned or forced to hange their name.  You can kind of tell by people who name their toons stupid names like that, that they are people you don't want to associate with anyway.  As one of the commenters on Altaclysmic's post said (which was a quote by Mark Cuban) "I'm the one guy who says don't force the stupid people to be quiet.  I want to know who the morons are." And I think that is a very good way of looking at it.  If the morons were hiding behind normal names, how am I supposed to know who I don't want to play with?