[Cigar Mike]

Wow...

A few years ago (also in S. Ca) part of my job involved setting new passwords and pass phrases for users on a computer network. We used a program that took about four or five dictionary words at random and threw some special characters in, and emailed the user directly on another account. One day a guy I'd never even met at an office 200 miles south of me needed a password, I ran the script, and within an hour I had an HR person and a lawyer on the phone with me with a racism complaint. Turns out there was a common English word in his password that applied to his race in a derogatory manner.

It took hours to explain how the password generator worked and how I had nothing to do with the words the program picked. When they told me what it said, I was completely unaware that the word in question was even a racial slur in any context....