Every time I hear “mongodb” I think of that guy from Blazing Saddles that punches horses.

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.

"spaz" is indeed short for "spastic", but it's not typically seen as an ableist slur like it is in the UK. Presumably, the word had been out of use as a term for people with cerebral palsy long enough in the US that it passed through the "Euphemism treadmill"[1], and is no longer associated with actual disability (similar to "imbecile" or "moron").

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan

BTW I find it telling, that the entire thread has been flagged and killed. If you tell someone in Germany unfamiliar with the NoSQL space that you plan on using "MongoDB" they'll look at you like you said you plan to use "R*tardDB".

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.

Explaining the Throttle option to my german colleagues is sometimes awkwardly funny (in german trottel = stupid)

Is "th" pronounced like a "t" in German? (Or is the German "t" pronounced like the English "th"?)

German doesn't have a "th" sound (okay, technically it's more correct to say German has neither of the two "th" sounds as this is an important difference when pointing out that English only has one of the two German "ch" sounds and only in some variants of English and almost exclusively in Scottish words but I digress).

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.

The first.