It wasn't just these phrases, but we took them out to be safe (thinking that them being jokes about male... "performance", like from pharma ads on TV with an old man throwing a football through a tire swing).

The biggest thing is that we used non-PC language like "retarded" very casually, not to mention casually swearing in commit messages e.g. "un-fucking up my prior commit". Our sister team got in trouble for "swears in the git commit history", so we wanted to get ahead of that if possible.

In a healthy company culture, we'd just say "okay we'll stop using these terms", but the effort was made to erase their existence because this was a company where non-engineering people (e.g. how well managers and HR liked you) was a big factor in getting promoted.

Once I realized how messed up that whole situation was, I left as fast as I could.