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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure Amazon really had much of a PR department back in 2005 when they launched the service and named it after a chess-playing “automaton” that had a human hidden in it to do all the thinking. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk

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If an 11yo firm with billions in revenue could avoid having "much of a PR department", I'm impressed. Even one PR person would seem to be enough to avoid naming a product after a nationality...

Of course Amazon has a PR department. But it also has thousands of teams and products, most of which were started by a handful of people and grown (or killed off if unsuccessful). There's a big difference between handling the global scale news stories Amazon is involved in and the naming of new products.

Shouldn't your product naming go through a review process?

That doesn't guarantee that a name like "Mechanical Turk" will be rejected. Maybe they asked a Turk who believed it to be unlikely to be an issue.

Personally, I think the historical reference is clever, but then I'd say the same if someone named an autonomous ship-control system "Flying Dutchman". Maybe I just have bad taste.

As a Turk I do not find the name offensive at all and I am certain most Turks would find it amusing had they heard of the product/service.

Turk is an ethnicity.

It's both (there is a real nation called "Turkey"), but why would one be more "acceptable" than the other?

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