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Comment by jimkleiber | Hacker News Reader

Ahh this brought me back! I wrote a paper in college about swearwords, taboo words, and euphemisms in first and second languages and interviewed one of my Danish friends, who shared similar sentiments about the word fuck. As an American, I feel trepidation to even type that word out here in a public forum lol. At least what I remember him saying is that he learned it from the film Raw by Eddie Murphy.

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And you've brought me back to a childhood memory of my older brother, age 13 with a big smile on his face, brought me into the closet where he had a portable cassette player and a newly acquired copy of Raw, and we listened to it and had our vocabulary suddenly expanded to a new level.

Lol, the level of secrecy we had back in those days, no two-way headphones, no phones, just had to scurry into corners to do the things our parents would say are bad, even though they did them just in their own scurried away corners. Thank you for sharing this story :-D

I was about that age when I discovered one of my Dad's records from Bill Cosby.

I had never considered that "Damnit" and "Jesus Christ" could be misconstrued as the names of two children.

I almost passed out laughing so hard at that album.

Sometime later, I discovered his Iron Butterfly album, which also changed my world.

..trepidation

then you should go and visit a therapist.

One thing that is more inappropriate and offensive than using the word "fuck" is suggesting that someone is mentally ill because they're not comfortable doing so.

Such a comment annoys me, even if in jest. I feel glad that I pause to think about how my words may impact people based on their expectations. I'm not sure what you were trying to imply by "go and visit a therapist"—that I should not care at all about how others feel? Maybe you think I care too much about how they feel and too little about how I feel but I still said the word, more to share how I believe HN has an expectation of not using that word too often.

EDIT: I also have my name attached to my words here and in most places on the internet, so I'm more mindful of how things said here can be read in other contexts where certain words are more taboo.

> Such a comment annoys me, even if in jest.

Rightfully so. Feel free to disregard.

Some people are very desensitized to sweating online, usually anonymously. Not wanting to doesn't merit psychiatric help.

Also just realized part of it is the worry that I'll get downvoted with little to no knowledge of why, which is one thing that bothers me on HN. This "am I playing by the rules" uncertainty, which I even feel as I type this. Is this a meta-comment that breaks some HN rule? Doesn't have enough curiosity?

All that to say there are often platform-specific norms about these things and I rarely see curse words on here.

EDIT: Also, thank you for your words.

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