On Wed, 8 Oct 2003, Dante Alighieri wrote:
At 02:53 PM 10/8/2003, sannse wrote:
Louis wrote (in part):
Mydogategodshat - Two readings here, my/dog/ate/gods/hat and my/dog/ate/god/shat. Both unacceptable.
I /do/ feel this one is unacceptable, and said so when it was first discussed in May. If feel it is directly comparable with our old friend the radioactive chicken.
OK, this is the old argument from the Request for Adminship page...
Can someone PLEASE explain to me what is offensive about that username? My Dog Ate God's Hat. It makes ABSOLUTELY no sense, sure, but offensive? Please...
FWIW, I had a brief exchange with the user in question. He was concerned that some members of Wikipedia didn't like using tables in articles, & was concerned that I might get in trouble for adding them to the series of Roman Emperor articles. From exchanging comments in each other's Talk: pages, my impression is that he's maybe a little naive, maybe worried about how people treat each other on Wikipedia, but most likely honest & sincere.
Out of curiousity, has anyone simply *asked* him what the point of his username is? I wouldn't be surprised if it's nothing more than a goofy, absurd bit of humor.
And don't complain about how some people could interpret it the other way... that other way also makes no sense and is grammatically shaky to boot.
Should we force JT not to use his nickname because some people might think the "fear" part of "fear�IREANN" was the imperative mood of the verb "fear" and an instruction that they should fear him? Please....
And for the record, the 3rd person declension of the Latin word ``facere" sounds an awful lot like an English obscenity (at least the way my Latin professor used to pronounce it). Should we also worry about someone using the string ``facit" in a username?
My point is that sometimes our worry for offensive names makes us too cautious. ISTR a Science Fiction story, in the usual space opera setting, where the point was made that names for the Galactic Federation spaceships had to be carefully selected to avoid an obscenity or sacrilegious phrase in the major languages of the member planets.
Geoff