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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

My name is Charles. I moved to the USA and everyone tries to call me "Chuck", which to my British psyche is horrible for the same linguistic reason.

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Look on the bright side: At least your name isn't 'Richard'.

Hey man, don't be a Dick.

I am currently wearing a "don't be a Richard" shirt which is one of my home improvement shirts. 2 different checkout folks at 2 different hardware stores were calling over coworkers because they both apparently had managers off today named Richard who were in fact "Richards".

Lol now I’m curious what is your other home improvement shirt. I could use an official way to convey to people that I may look like I’m just puttering around but I am actually on a diy mission.

oh by diy shirts I mean all the shirts that I have oil stains on or paint... that I wear when I just don't give a f or hwne I know I'm going to get more dirty. I have one that is an old mozzila appu shirt... with a sweet gtradient on it. The gradient came from me usinga circular slot cutter on a mill that tossed metal and oil at my midline and taperd off as it fell.

As an aside, people often misattribute where that word comes from. It's from dicker - squandering time by squabbling over petty things

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dicker

It's certainly not polite but people claiming it's lewd have about as much ground to stand on as they do with the word "pussycat"

pusy and dick are common terms for lewd things. pussycat and dicker are not.

Past etymology isn't really relevant to how a word is actually used today. There are plenty of awful slurs that were once everyday words used offensively.

This definitely applies if your last name is "Armey". But some people just run with it!

Being called Randolph would be worse.

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