>>5
She explains how the unfortunate name came to be in the link posted in >>3.
The first thing you have to consider is that I'm not a native English speaker, and my English is not very good. OK, that page might make you think otherwise, and indeed, I do fare decently in business and computer English. However I have much more problems with literary English, and I have a quite limited grasp of slang English, mainly because I'm not often exposed to it.
For example, I know “bitch” and “whore” are slang derogatory words for women, and that's about it. Without doing any research, I have no idea whether one could be more offensive than the other, whether there is some subtle difference in meaning (either literal or figurative), or whether they have non-derogatory meaning (a hazy memory goes towards “bitch” also meaning a female dog without connotation, but I wouldn't rely on it).
The second thing is that I'm terrible at choosing names. I can spend months hesitating between several possibilities, and even longer when I cannot come up with any. I get somehow locked in a mental state that I'm unable to leave by myself.
So when I started writing a markdown parser in C, I ended up asking for help in finding a name on #freebsd-fr. That was on October 13th, 2009. The first idea that came up from there was “upskirt”, with “up” in reference to the “down” of markdown, and the link between “skirt” and “mark” was “still to be decided”.
I did know the sexual and voyeurism connotations of the word “upskirt” and I was very hesitant to actually use it. For the record, my limited grasp of slang English means that I genuinely had no idea where it lied on the offensiveness scale, and whether it could be covered up as something more harmless (and have it be more of an innuendo than of a basic offensive word).
Maybe she thought open source projects can get away with sexually connotated names? The IRC client BitchX is also the first thing that I can think of right now, but I know there are others.
I ended up asking for help in finding a name on #freebsd-fr
Do I need to remind that the most poorly named softare ever, Weechat, is also a French project? Thank you, I'll stick with Irssi, instead of trying to customize Weechat to look less like a Christmas tree and somewhat like Irssi.
I think there also was an ircd named "Hitler". Can't find it, there are thousands of projects named "Hitler" on Github.