All they really had to do is give the name the standard Fantasy treatment: MayHne K’ahun or some other vaguely rune-like transliteration.
Well… they changed the name from “The Fighting Coons” to the “Fighting Raccoons”. Not much of a change in terms of logos and mascots, but definitely a lot less double-take inducing when you hear it on the evening news.
The same thing (more or less) happened in Dark Age of Camelot which is run by Mythic- in patch 1.37 they had to change the name of a named ghost-horse thing from Spook to Shadowgnash, allegedly because of complaints over the racial slur.
Fun times.
Idlewild, was the horse black?
Yes. But so were all the other pookas, which was the kind of ghost horse thingy that it was.
Balderdash! Everyone knows pookas are six-foot-tall white rabbits.
They are also very personable and quite good companions.
Yes. Maybe the ghosty-horse thing was actually a kelpie?
Huh? This one went over my head. Is there are common word not used as a racial slur somwhere?
Anyway, black horses are called pookas in some places.
“Spook” is an older epithet for African-Americans.
Although I’d like to note that I think the oversensitivity of seeing any possible word choice that even vaguely has any connection to slurs that haven’t been used in a generation by more than an extremely tiny subset of the population as denoting intent to insult is silly and stupid.
Bad language drives out good. We need to be vigilant about this. Whoever complained about Maine Coon now has justification for this belief, as well as supporting evidence.
When “vinegar” gets changed to “vinegro” we will know the battle is lost.
You’re kidding, right? What if I call Valerie Plame a spook? After all, she was a CIA agent.
He’s not kidding. It was a derogatory term for blacks, although it’s hardly ever used that way any more. Obviously, calling Valerie Palme a spook is not a racial slur, because the word has an entirely seperate definition in that context. But as the OP of this thread indicates, a lot of people are too dumb to make that distinction.
Umm, vinegro?
My irony meter is broken so I’m not sure if I’ve just been whooshed.
Uh, coon is a rather common slur for aboriginals in Australia.
Cut off the first syllable of the original word and say it again…
Irony for now, but sadly people think these sorts of things all the time!
As a paladin engineer who had no time for…BAH! living pets!! …I still think this is utterly ridiculous to pander to idiocy in this way.
“Nigger” and “negro” are both considered politically incorrect. Obviously, it will be changed to viafrican-american.
Thanks beergeek279. I’d kinda guessed that since I posted last. But I still don’t get why going from 'vi-nigger" to 'vi-negro" shows an improvement. Is it because it’s one step up the “offensive label ladder”? Maybe I’m trying too hard to get a simple witticism.
Ah, and on preview; what Mobo85 said.