Inflammatory Topic Titles

(Moved from and based on the topic titles BrainDamage, and ToolsThatTeachPoorHabits)

I find the word poor to be very inflammatory - it can imply one is incapable, incompetent, poor, inferior, etc. Changing words such as Damage to phrases such as Poor Habits doesn't necessarily make things any better on this wiki. Poor habits is just as insulting, especially if someone tells me that I have poor habits and I take it personally.

You have a system of injustice weighting that does not fit the norm. I'm not saying it is inherently "wrong", because morals are relative to the person and culture; but most would find your weightings outside the mainstream or averages. In this case, pointing out a "poor habit" is not nearly as severe a dig level in most people's minds as claiming that their brain is "damaged", implying a permanent physical flaw.

Brain Damage is much funnier and adds so much humor that it cancels out any seriousness - while poor habits actually sounds quite alarmingly serious and insulting without any tongue in cheek.
If a vote of WikiZens found it not funny by at least 80%, would you be willing to change it? I'm curious as to what percent you would expect such a vote.

Someone claimed "brain damage" added humor to this wiki. I have to dissagree. In my opinion, it is childish. Children enjoy saying extreme and provocative things regardless of relevancy. It is not used in a clever and ironic way, but rather just "there" like a spit-ball on the ceiling of the boys room. There are already plenty of shouting young newbies on the web. This wiki does not need to be yet another one of those kinds of places. There is already a glut of them. Perhaps one can claim that those who don't like that style out are "out of touch with the times". Regardless, if you ignore WhenInRome, it will cause friction here.

(Note that none of the following is written by me. --top)

I'd like to float another idea here - the JargonFile defines brain-damaged as something "obviously wrong", and some of the things we talk about in this context here might seem very wrong to some but are not necessarily obviously so. It may seem obvious, but many such things are only TrivialOnceUnderstood. It therefore appears to me that, even humorously, the deascription is inaccurate.

The jargon file was messed up by ESR and it mainly consists of his opinion - it is just as valid of a reference as this wiki - it is written by a crackpot, and the definition of brain damage in the jargon file is just as credible as one from a 3 year old child.
- (IsYourRudenessNecessary?) This would seem to contradict reality. Google for retarded policy -mental -mentally [472000], or brain-damaged design [174000], and you'll find plentiful evidence for the use of such terms precisely to mean something utterly, utterly wrong/broken/self-defeating/whatever. I put forward that it is inappropriate for wiki not for its tone, but because (almost) EverythingIsRelative. Very few topics of discussion here involve unqualified failures. I suggest that such InflammatoryTopicTitles are not so because of insulting words that some prudes think to be in bad taste, but because they load it with more assumptions than stated in the topic (any topic ending in "Sucks" makes its agenda explicit, but a name such as ToolsThatTeachPoorHabits carries the implicit assumption that the habits at issue are always poor for all people all of the time). That said, if readers are not prepared to stumble upon a little TongueInCheek?, and take it with a PinchOfSalt?, they really have no business being on the Internet in the first place. (Cf. "Welcome to the Internet. No one here likes you." - hundreds of mirrors around)
  - I'd like to thank whoever edited the page recently for distorting my comments and rendering this part of the page more-or-less unreadable. A great way to PlayTheManNotTheBall. Try not to break the comment apart like that - it has a tendency to lose the context. [DeleteWhenCooked]

Here are some suggestions if you wish to create a topic name with minimal chance of offending somebody:

Don't claim that a technique or tool is "bad" in the title.
- Example: "X Frustrations" instead of "X Sucks".
Don't imply a connection between concepts that may be controversial.
- Example: "X and Y" instead of "X is Y" or "X breaks Y".
Make it a question instead of a statement:
- Example: "Should Compilers Beep?" instead of "Compilers Should Beep". (Wiki cannot use question marks, but one can usually tell it's a question by word order.)