Honest to gods, this conversation happened today, and it may have cost me a job opportunity. The customer was super impressed with my menu design and animation, and wanted to know who we got it from. When I said I did it, their face lit up! Too bad as soon as i said GIMP, they weren't interested anymore. Has anyone else experienced this? What do you say in similar situations?
From Wiktionary:
A person who is lame due to a crippling of the legs or feet.
(slang, derogatory) A name-calling word, generally for a person who is perceived to be inept, deficient or peculiar.
(BDSM) A submissive dressed in a full-body suit of latex or a similar material.
I'm vaguely sure the first two meanings above appeared earlier. Perhaps the name was taken as a nod to ‘geek’ and ‘dweeb’, which were slurs for programmers back before the profession became mainstream. Edit: apparently not: "The software was originally named the General Image Manipulation Program. Kimball and Mattis formed the acronym GIMP by adding the letter G to '-IMP,' inspired by a reference to 'the gimp' in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction."
Somewhat relatedly, Torvalds called his versioning software ‘git’, which is also a derogatory term, a British-specific one at that. (And the original name of Linux was 'Freax'.)