How's that for off topic?!
I remember when I grew up we used to call each other mongo as a joke and not meaning anything bad about it, but then on one occasion a teacher overheard us and told us that she was sad to hear people use the word that way because she had a grandchild with Down’s syndrome. I think this was one of the first times I learned that words said to one person can be hurtful to someone else even if they were not the person you said it to. And after that I’ve tried to be more conscious about which words I use in public.
My employer thought it would be cheaper to use Mongodb then hiring people who understood SQL - then free turned into a subscription, and a support plan got added in, now it’s a six figure expense per year. Plus it turns out that developers who don’t understand SQL are really unbelievably bad at everything else database related, so all the Mongodb queries end up being linear scans, and the apps fall over when the dataset grows beyond core memory size - because the app developers like to read the entire collection into ram then iterate through manually and pick the records they want.
It’s a huge rewrite when they can no longer do that.
It's a genuine real-life problem and the general category of problems is especially well-known in the marketing space. It's probably more widely known in Europe than the US (where English-only is historically the norm) but there are a few examples that occasionally get brought up on HN (e.g. the island "Laputa" being named differently in Spanish editions of works featuring it, although the unfortunate implication possibly being intentional in that case).
Outside the database space there's also Wix, who after problems getting traction in Germany tried to "own" the implication of their name by using "Ich wixe" ("I jerk off" but misspelled) or "Ich bin ein Wixer" ("I'm a wanker" but misspelled) in their German ads. I don't see any company being able to pull this off with a name that sounds like an ableist slur though.
I'm not saying Americans are (intentionally) ableist when they say "spaz" but it's definitely a word that can provoke very different reactions when used in an international context. I don't know enough about the etymology to say whether it's like "fanny" (which refers to two very different body parts depending on which country you're from) or "c*nt" (which pretty much means the same thing regardless of where you're from but can either be a friendly taunt or extreme insult because of cultural differences) but it's certainly something to be aware of.
This isn't the kind of problem you'd want to have with the name of your product is all I'm saying. I guess I'm just happy FerretDB didn't go with SpazDB.
But based on my experience it's a coin toss whether German speakers who don't know enough English to be able to make an attempt at pronouncing it will go for "trottel" or "srottel" in that case, with the latter being even more likely if they go by ear rather than reading the word spelled out.
> “mongo” is a derogatory term that is equally offensive as calling someone a retard
> git, noun. British Slang. a foolish or contemptible person.
"Gimp" can be an ableist slur for someone with a walking impairment in US and Canadian English but also to someone engaging in BDSM (hence "gimp suit"). The GIMP project has also seen a fork in part due to conflicting opinions about whether the name should be changed (tho I think more people were aware of the BDSM meaning and felt uncomfortable with having sexual innuendos in professional software).
"Mongo" (in German, and presumably Dutch also, anyway) specifically is used to mock cognitive disability and is derived from the historical medical term "mongoloid" which in itself was already racist. Unlike git and GIMP it's also extremely likely none of the people involved in picking the name were aware of its unfortunate meaning since the name sounds innocuous in English.
The sexual term's etymology is the ableist slur. The gimp suit gimps you. It's the same thing.
Whereas in countries where "mongo" or some version thereof is a slur, for MongoDB it's racism -> ableism -> product name or even racism + ableism -> product name
The difference is subtle but IMO what makes it worse is that while "gimping" is a dismissive reference to disability, "mongo" is a slur directly mocking a person with a (real or alleged) disability. As I said, you wouldn't want to call your product "Ret*rdDB" either.
But I think arguing over which is worse misses the point: it's a good idea to check for foreign language implications when picking a name and you should avoid relying on juvenile puns.