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It is more the explicit reference to toilets, which also drags the term plumbing into it, as I cannot think of something else than sewage in this context. I don't find the term plumbing by itself off-putting.

And it certainly isn't about being offended by "other people's culture". I talked to enough americans who shared my sentiment. And as we see here in the discussion, it just wasn't understood. That was the other part of what I wrote: even if the term might be completely innocent, it might be difficult to understand for outsiders.

It is not, that I haven't been guilty myself of bad naming in my projects. It can be fun or even convenient to come up with "insider" terms. But as soon as you have to communicate with outsiders to the project, the tend to bite you, even if there is no offensiveness about it.

Naming is one of the hard problems in software engineering :)



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