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Comment by gommm | Hacker News Reader

There's a clear difference between "I like your new haircut" which I agree is not sexual harassment and MILF: Mother I'd Like to Fuck (which is just slightly above calling your coworker slut). The second sentence is sexual harassment.

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We don't know if the mentioned person's mother tongue is English. They may well not know that MILF is mother I like to f*ck. I'm from a non English speaking country and I can say that I haven't met anybody who'd know that. I myself didn't know that until I read a Wikipedia article. The OP should first try to see if this is the case, otherwise fire them. Some are bad at flirting, and sometimes you say silly things. We shouldn't be this generous at calling everything sexual harassment.

If that is the case, would you, not knowing the meaning of a word, use that word in a professional environment? And also, does not understanding the meaning of the word excuse it's use?

I said he may have mistaken the meaning of the word. They don't have footnotes on porn sites deciphering milf, bdsm, cfnm etc. Sometimes we say silly things in foreign languages. And also in our mother tongues. It's not like we check every word we use in the dictionary.

Helpful Hint: If the only place you see a word is on porn sites, it's probably not a good thing to call a coworker.

Oh thank you I didn't know that!

In many states, intent doesn't matter for sexual harassment -- even if the person saying "MILF" didn't know what it meant, the recipient could still construe it as harassment (and win!).

And some states still execute people and until recently some didn't allow homosexual marriages. Some states kept slavery well into the twentieth century. Do we measure right and wrong with state legislations?

I'll ignore your strawman entirely.... and just say: If the OP wants to protect his business, the offending employee's intent is immaterial when it comes to exposing himself^ and his company to undue legal risk.

^ IIRC in California managers (as company representatives) are personally liable if they knew of the harassment and didn't take corrective action.

OP needs to lawyer up, deal with this, and address harassment more broadly in the company. Sucks to deal with... but is mandatory training for all medium-to-big companies.

Doesn't there have to be persistence involved for something to become harassment instead of just being a single instance of a offensive/dumb/annoying comment?

No, harassment is a violation of the norms of a professional workplace. If it only happens once, it still happened. It might not always be a firing offense, but at minimum it requires management to intervene and reset expectations.

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