Trigger warning: if you found this page, you almost certainly know what XXXX meant in context already. Don’t come whining to me if you read on anyway - you’re actively looking for offense then.

This relates to one of my crimes:

  • Using potentially offensive language or slurs, in one case even calling an SNL skit from the 1970s using the same slur “genuinely funny”, which shows a lack of empathy towards other community members.

The Ministry of Truth apparently put the original post into the memory hole. But they left a copy of the relevant part quoted in a later post:

One of the very few split decisions I recall from my Board days would fall under the “CoC” label today. It was about kicking a package off of PyPI, because its docs repeatedly used a word that Dan Akroyd used to apply to Jane Curtin (brilliant comic actors from America’s “Saturday Night Live” TV show, but back in the days when it was genuinely funny :wink:).

Of course Dan’s line was “Jane, you ignorant slut!”. The name of the Python package was slut.py.

Note that I never said the skit was funny. I said the show was funny, to help date it. Even then, the “wink” was a telegraphic clue about a larger digression that wasn’t worth typing out: the meaning of “genuinely funny” is subjective. But it’s a fact that the Akroyd/Curtin days are widely viewed as being SNL’s “Golden Years”.

Neither did I say, or imply, that SNL was funny because it used the word “slut”.

And I said it was an American show as a clue to many international readers (especially European) that they’d probably find it as inoffensive as applesauce. In many other cultures, “slut” has no “shock value” at all - they routinely hear far harsher on their mainstream TV channels.

SNL was in fact irrelevant to the point. It was merely a way to let people know which word I had in mind, without actually using the word, which word I knew made some people uncomfortable. So, ya, more of my crimes involve convolutions to avoid giving offense. I may have mentioned before that it’s impossible to “win” this stupid game :wink:.

And why was it important that people know the word in question? Because I want to be explicit when I’m talking: plain and clear. I’m not a bureaucrat or a politician. “Explicit is better than implicit.”

In context we were talking about how high a bar the Board should have to leap to vote out a Fellow. I was arguing for a unanimous vote, which the Board almost always achieved in my years on it. But, while people in general can’t think their way out of a sheet of wet tissue paper without knee-jerk confirmation bias “thinking” for them, here I was presenting evidence contrary to my position. Why? Because I want to be fair.

This was one of the very earliest CoC enforcement actions, and I was on the Board at the time, and the vote was as close as possible to being tied. It was evidence of that maybe “unanimous” was too high a bar for a major CoC decision. In the slut.py case, the issue was about as minor as possible (nobody actually cared about the package - not even its author replied to questions about it).

As to SNL: yes, while I never said so, I did think the recurring Curtin/Akroyd Point/Counterpoint segments were comedy gold. Brilliant comic writing, brilliantly delivered by Curtin and Akroyd. Akroyd’s “Jane, you ignorant slut!” catchphrase was a tiny part of it, no more or less funny than Curtin’s “Dan, you pompous ass!” and “Dan, you miserable failure!” catchphrases.

It was hilarious parody of the “60 Minutes” recurring Point/Counterpoint segments. It was also a major accomplishment for comediennes: Curtin’s recurring role in this segment ensured her steady work in an extremely competitive environment, playing an intelligent character. Not a bimbo, airhead, scold, or passive victim. Major props to her and Akroyd.