[tholman]

Am I missing something, or is "kwon-artist" a racism-style play on words much like say, "kung-flu"? Cmon...

_edit_ ~ Sounds like I'm wrong here by the general sentiment, was taught not to use name's as puns :(

[tbk-1]

I mean it's just a play on words. His name is Kwon, and kwon-artist sounds like con artist.

[goindeep]

Thank you.

[risho]

that is some serious gymnastics you are doing to make this out to be racist.

[dtn]

It's not inherently racist, but I would conjecture that these puns occur more frequently with Asian names (unfortunate spellings are pretty popular e.g. Phuc, Bich, Wang, etc. despite pronunciation being completely different). One factor is probably due to their rarity in comparison to Anglo names.

It results in terribly tasteless, low-brow "jokes" such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaOkTKfxu44

[baggy_trough]

Have you heard of puns before?

[anm89]

Are you implying that it is inherently racist to call a Korean person by their name?

[woodruffw]

I think it's manifest that they aren't implying that. They said directly that the pun is the part they found objectionable.

[8f2ab37a-ed6c]

Literally not a single person except for you looked at it from that angle. Why stoke the fire?

[sbisker]

The headline struck me as unusually crass for HN even before I saw the parent comment. I was a bit surprised it wasn’t rewritten. So, I guess I’m a second person.

Maybe it’s generational, but I was taught to avoid using names in puns. I definitely grew up with people who would make last name puns like this to put undue emphasis on race.

If folks doesn’t even see why that would be a problem these days, I’ll take it as a win for society - but I think the question was in good faith.