Raemon comments on Advice Request: Baconmas Website - Less Wrong

9 Post author: orthonormal 01 January 2012 07:25PM

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Comment author: Nornagest 02 January 2012 10:26:36PM *  4 points [-]

The -mas suffix indicates Mass in the Christian sense, as you might have expected; so yes, it has definite religious overtones. It's not completely inappropriate if you dig deep enough into the etymology (it suggests a mission; spreading the good news, so to speak), but I'd expect relatively few people to do so.

Comment author: Raemon 02 January 2012 11:24:23PM *  3 points [-]

Part of the advantage of Newtonmass is that it's a sufficiently clever joke (IMO anyway) that it becomes less about sending up Christmas than the double meaning of "mass." Or at least it can, if you explain it right.

Regardless, I don't think either Baconmas or Newtonmas or Newtonmass are actually all that offensive. My suspicion is that the sort of Christian who would get annoyed would also be annoyed at the range of politically correct holiday greetings that explicitly AVOID mentioning Christmas at all, so the reference builds Christmas' importance rather than diminishes, in some ways. Dunno. I don't know if I have a good enough model of the type of people we're concerned about here.

However, an alternative: Baconalia

Comment author: windmil 03 January 2012 01:49:36PM 1 point [-]

Wasn't that an add campaign for Denny's?