Jonathan Kay: From the geeky world of dongles and forking, a sad tale of political correctness

True to stereotype, these tech geeks mostly are young and male and bursting with industry buzz phrases. So when one of the speakers at PyCon started going on about “dongles” and “forking” (the former being a tiny hardware device, the latter being a common programming term), it was natural that a few of the audience members — employees of a company called Play Haven, as it happened — began riffing comically on this odd jargon.

Unfortunately, they did so within earshot of one Adria Richards — a fellow tech geek evangelist who also has a reputation as a sort of politically correct language commissar within the software-developer community. Ms. Richards snapped a picture of the two men with her cell phone, and posted it on Twitter with the name-and-shame annotation: “Not cool. Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and ‘big’ dongles.”

Her photo showed the name-tag of one of the men. As a result, the pair were approached and censured by the conference organizers. Two days later, one of them was fired by Play Haven — “which sucks,” he wrote on a message forum, “because I have three kids and I really liked that job.”

Read the whole article at The National Post