Honest to gods, this conversation happened today, and it may have cost me a job opportunity. The customer was super impressed with my menu design and animation, and wanted to know who we got it from. When I said I did it, their face lit up! Too bad as soon as i said GIMP, they weren’t interested anymore. Has anyone else experienced this? What do you say in similar situations?

  • voidsignal
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    1 day ago

    It’s funny, because I’m not a native speaker and Gimp means… well… this software. I only learned what it meant years later.

      • [object Object]
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        13 hours ago

        From Wiktionary:

        • A person who is lame due to a crippling of the legs or feet.

        • (slang, derogatory) A name-calling word, generally for a person who is perceived to be inept, deficient or peculiar.

        • (BDSM) A submissive dressed in a full-body suit of latex or a similar material.

        I’m vaguely sure the first two meanings above appeared earlier. Perhaps the name was taken as a nod to ‘geek’ and ‘dweeb’, which were slurs for programmers back before the profession became mainstream. Edit: apparently not: “The software was originally named the General Image Manipulation Program. Kimball and Mattis formed the acronym GIMP by adding the letter G to ‘-IMP,’ inspired by a reference to ‘the gimp’ in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction.”

        Somewhat relatedly, Torvalds called his versioning software ‘git’, which is also a derogatory term, a British-specific one at that. (And the original name of Linux was ‘Freax’.)

        • darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          12 hours ago

          From Wiktionary:

          • A person who is lame due to a crippling of the legs or feet.
          • (slang, derogatory) A name-calling word, generally for a person who is perceived to be inept, deficient or peculiar.
          • (BDSM) A submissive dressed in a full-body suit of latex or a similar material.

          I doubt that many people know that word. I just tried looking it up in my Collins Cobuild English Dictionary, which has frequency information and tells you how common or uncommon different words are, but it didn’t have any entry for gimp at all. In its own roundabout way, I guess that’s also a pretty good indicator of how uncommon that word really is.