That’s a little sad. 
Expectations or not, having some sort of celebration – could be a quiet party at home, could be going out to a restaurant – was a standard way of marking the accomplishment of graduating. It’s usually a fairly low-key, family affair, but cake is absolutely a normal part of it (though I don’t personally remember cake at my college graduation.) I mean, I was expected to turn 8 years old and 9 years old and 10 years, etc., and I still got a cake out of it! This was at least somewhat earned.
This is one cake that you probably don’t want hand decorated. Just in case Ron is working that day.
The thing that annoys me most about this story is the mother’s reaction to it.
They refunded her money, gave her a gift card, and apologized, for a mistake the software designer made.
And she acts as if her son has been irreparably damaged.
Good grief lady!
He has!
Before this happened, her son had no idea that “cum” was a dirty word, or even that there were dirty words.
Now, as a result of going online and trying to find out what “cum” means, the son has gotten addicted to bukkake, felching, and German scat porn.
Woohoo! I just found out that I was the valedictorian of my high school class!
It did:
“She ordered the $70 sheet cake online through Publix, but she was alerted profane or special characters weren’t allowed when she requested the bakery include Jacob’s honor.”
Deeper irony: I bet that the defective “bad word checker” database wouldn’t catch any of those phrases. 
(Well, maybe “porn”, because (A) bluenoses have to have a name for the thing they hate, and (B) it would also catch perfectly legitimate Thai personal names.)
No, I’m not going onto the Pube-licks cake decorating website to find out.
I think dseid meant the event should have alerted a customer service representative involved in the cake-decorating process to intervene and apply a sanity check to the software’s moronic response.
If so, that would be a good idea, except I doubt the process would have a CSR, because customer service costs money – that’s why the process was automated to begin with.
Wow, I had never ever heard of Latin honors for high school grads before this.
“If I knew you were cumin’ I’d have baked a cake”
I am sorry, Eileen Barton.
Ewww, cake with cumin in it.
Yeah, back around that time, I once had a passing interest in learning to make my own sausages from scratch. Wanting to look into the needed equipment, I Googled “sausage stuffing.” The results I got were not was I was expecting. At all.
My niece is in a virtual high school program that sounds a lot like this.
As for decorating being automated, I suppose that depends on how you order it. A couple years ago, my mom ordered a cake (by walking up to the counter and choosing the one she wanted) and wanted “Happy Trifecta Birthday” written on it, because my brother, my aforementioned niece (his daughter) and I all have birthdays within a week of each other, and she had to explain to the decorator what a trifecta was, how to spell it, and why she wanted that word on the cake. Maybe now I know why they asked her so many questions.
Someone on another website had a young child who liked stories about bears, and when he Googled that, he did so not knowing that in the gay community, a “bear” is a hefty man with lots of body hair. Hoo boy, did he find that out.
Only slightly, because the person involved also included it in the special instructions. And even if that was also censored, it is a fixed phrase, so they should still have been able to figure out what word was supposed to be there. Or at least figured out that they didn’t want — on their cake. Leave it out, and at least it could be fixed later.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that big a deal. But I do think there is still the moronic element involved. Or possibly the idea “I know it’s supposed to be cum laude, but I might get in trouble for writing that word, so I better not.”
And, yes, good software should be able to get around the Scunthorpe problem by now. Just make an exception for certain fixed phrases.
The card game Magic: the Gathering has an online database where you can see all of the cards, and comment on them. And for a while, that comment system had a similarly-moronic filter. What made it especially annoying is that some cards use a mechanic called “cumulative upkeep”. Or, rather, “***ulative upkeep”.
Even worse was a card named “Rootwater thief”, because the system for linking to a specific card involved using the card’s name, and the censor broke all of those links. Fortunately that card didn’t get mentioned all that often (aside, of course, from complaints about the auto-censor).
Or, more likely, an Indian doughnut with cumin and cinnamon 
We had a communication failure at work many years ago, where the client’s email filter automatically discarded any mail that contained the words “do the right thing”.
People should just stop writing shit on cakes, it causes way too many problems.
I’m pretty sure that’s a forbidden word.
This far in the thread without a Magnum Cum Laude wisecrack?