It's weird that people are punished for talking about dongles in a professional setting when dongles are a technical term relevant to their profession, and the context of the word is not a joke or innuendo unless there is some insinuating tone of voice to accompany that otherwise pretty innocuous comment.

That's not weird at all cupcake.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/bryanzug/13982071359/

Explain to me how that relates to dongle-gate?

Words aren't just words. They have context.

Sometimes a dongle as an adapter. Sometimes it's a dick.

It's not hard to tell the difference.

Well that's my point. According to what I've heard about 'the incident', the statement could be interpreted to really just be about dongles in the relevant technical sense. And it was such a perfectly normal sentence that there were no clear signs of having deliberately tried to make a pun or something like that. So then you're just left with how the sentence was said, which we don't know much about (I think).

> It's not hard to tell the difference.

Perhaps, if you know that "dongle" is a technical term, and you don't take the sentence out of context (like overhearing only one sentence). Besides, many catch themselves in making unintentional puns and innuendos, only noticing after-the-fact that the sentence could be interpreted in another way. It surely isn't so unlikely that one can justify firing people point-blank when they do make such a mistake!