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Comment by zyemuzu | Hacker News Reader

Give it a break, everyone knows and understands this context of 'pimping' something.

The endless virtue signalling is so tiresome.

It isn’t apparent to me to me that this person has “virtue signaled” by expressing their opinion. Why dive immediately for sinister motivations when someone says that a particular piece of language makes them uncomfortable?

Their motives aren't necessarily sinister, but they are pearl-clutching bullshit without which the world would, in general, be a much better place.

Oh no, this noun if used in an entirely different context means something different! Oh my stars! I mean, give me a break. It is in the best case, bending over backward to avoid even the slightest offense or misunderstanding on something so basic it can safely be taken for granted even among non-native - likely even non-fluent - speakers who are much less familiar and comfortable with English idioms. It is in a slightly worse case, virtue signaling exactly as the GP suggests.

I genuinely don’t understand: are you saying that the world would be a better place if more people said “pimp” as in “pimp my ride?”

Pearl-clutching aside, I genuinely struggle to see how that’s true. To my mind, the world would be just about the same.

Not this example specifically, but the world would be better with less of the general mindset. That is, the "hey if I bend over backwards and look for any possible way in which you can twist my words and take offense to them, I'm going to assume that's what you meant and start saying how 'problematic' it is." Let's remember we're talking about a weekend project web app that puts gifs and links in readme files that in all likelihood get read close to never. And the comment that started this jumps immediately to "sexual exploitation and sexual traficking (sic)" because of an extremely common idiom that's been around for at least 25 years or so.

I'm not 100% sure I agree that it's wokeness specifically but there are certainly some parallels at the very least.

The term for this is wokeness. It is typified by overly sensitive, agenda-pushing, irrational behavior that uses offense as a tool to further their political agenda, oppress those who oppose and exemplify eggregious levels of false moral-superiority (and virtue signal to their mob). As President Obama says [1], it is not activism.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM

This is, again, a lot of fear-laden and breathless language in response to a single person saying that they’re uncomfortable with a word. You don’t know anything about them, much less whether they have a political agenda or “eggregious (sic) levels of false moral-superiority.” What gives?

Because the inability or unwillingness of commenters to separate unrelated context from the matter at hand is frustrating and distracting. It does seem like virtue signaling to me because the original commenter goes off an unrelated tangent.

"this word you've used has reminded me of something I don't like and so I'm going to complain about it instead of discussing the actual topic."

Speaking personally it bothers me because it implies either the OP intended to be offensive, or that it was careless to use language that's not devoid of any other context. Neither are reasonable in this case, so it's feels needlessly intrusive, and distracting.

I probably wouldn't feel this way if they commenter attempted to show an assumption of good faith by asking if they considered the context others might have related to the word 'pimp'. Instead of asserting it's outright wrong to be willing to use it.

> I'm not a fan of it is this context. And I hate it in this other context. Obviously the word itself is always a bad word to use. Because the context I care about it clearly the most important.

> The endless virtue signalling is so tiresome.

And yet you felt the need to signal your tribe while trying to shut down someone's speech.

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