My daughter has a Nintendo 3DS and recently purchased a Harvest Moon game for it. She made a purple-haired character and, when prompted for a name, tried to name her Violet. The name was rejected by the game as “inappropriate”.
Why in the world would the name “Violet” be inappropriate? It doesn’t contain any inappropriate words that I can see (as in the “Scunthorpe” problem), it’s the name of a color and a flower (seems innocent enough to me) and it is a legitimate girl’s first name to boot! It just doesn’t make any sense.
Does the word “violet” contain a rude word in some other language? Is it slang for something I’m not familiar with?
I did some googling, and all I found was a post on another message board asking the same question and coming up with no results.
Could it be a character’s name in-game? Like could there end up being on-screen dialog with Violet and Violet, where Violet just doesn’t understand what Violet is saying, no matter how much Violet tries to explain to Violet?
Well, it’s my daughter’s game, and, unfortunately she doesn’t want me to start over in the name of science. I do know “violent” would not work because it is too long (that’s the reason she didn’t use her real first name.)
Is “viol” a particularly sensitive word to French speakers, that even seeing it embedded in another unrelated word would be offensive? I mean, it would be like me getting upset over the word “grape”.
My daughter told me she would try to name her next chicken “Grape” and see what happens.
Second: . . . Holy crap! In both French and English there is a word for “a shade of purple” that contains the word for “rape”? That is just too bizarre. Having seen two examples, I can only conclude that this must be true in every language.