It still fascinates me that everything goes back to having a pair or not. For me it’s not the profanity but where it goes back to that makes me pause.

Ti generalize the expression to both genders, in Italy the pair can refer to testicles, breasts or ovaries. The point being “having significant reproductive potential”... I hope it will never be poco’d to avoid offending people that have reproductive disorders.

My point was more that what most people want to express is “guts”. But they’ll go for “balls” because it needs to be about sex and hormones, what else could it be, right ?

Huh? As someone under 40 I never remotwly had that feeling when talking to e.g. Unix greybeards or other programmers above 50.

Some of their experiences and tricks are great to learn from, some of the stuff they complain abput has been solved for a decade but they don't know it yet. I think if everybody has the feeling that we can learn from each other, we profit more from our interactions.

...they have "a pair" because they use words that as a society we've decided shouldn't be used because they're derogatory to a certain group of people?

I understood GP as talking about what is in the 'overton window' or not. You and I may have qualms about saying retard but I've worked in industries where that is not the case. I've met people who would call an unprofitable VC-backed company whose only customer-facing product is a well-designed chat client telling them what is or is not acceptable to say something I wouldn't say here.

Society is not as monolithic as you think it is. "as a society we" for sure have not decided that these words should not be used or that they are derogatory. Maybe this is true for your circle of friends or for the communities that you enage in but it is not true for the wider world.

When did that happen?

We didn't decide that.

Just like "we" didn't decide on "latinx" or "woman" or that "white lives matter" and the "ok" gesture were racist.

Our "betters" decided those things on our behalf and simply called us racist misogynist incels if we didn't comply.

Man that OK Gesture was brilliant psyops by 4chan.

Well, it’s not really OK, you need to spread the fingers to make it look like WP.

(I find it ironic how all these dimwits adopt behaviors and attitudes from the ghetto gangs they would claim are their cultural anti-model.)

You have to spread the fingers to form OK sign.

Dimwits? You mean 4chan that used media to make neutral sign look racist? Or the white supremacists that took the free advertisement and appropriated a common sign?

The only dimwits are the media companies that contributed to it.