I understand "ricing" to mean customising the appearance of a Linux machine, see e.g https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/top/?sort=top&t=month (SFW). So in this case I assume the UI has a cat theme or cat icons.
I think the etymology is from "rice burner" cars [0]:
> Riced out is an adjective denigrating a badly customized sports car, "usually with oversized or ill-matched exterior appointments".
Rice stands for Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements.
Race-inspired to look cool, but not actually functional. Picture putting one of those giant fake air intakes on the hood of your car.
Do you think "Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements" is the origin of "ricing" / "riced-out" or a backronym[1]?
Honest curiosity about language and language use.
In fairness and full disclosure: I have believed until now that the language comes from rice-burners and related, and I have never liked it. If I were still in communities that used it (unix desktop crowd), I might proactively steer newcomers towards your acronym as a kind of reclaiming.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym
> I might proactively steer newcomers towards your acronym as a kind of reclaiming.
Any negative connotations "rice burner" once had was lost when the term shifted towards referring to cars instead of humans. But now re-recognizing that the enhancements are inspired by the East Asian race turns the connotations back to humans. Isn't that a regression?
Nah, I remember back then, it was definitely intended to be derogatory to the cars, to asians, and to people who like the cars.
Yes, the term originated as derogatory slang towards the Asian population in the early 1900s, and its use towards them became especially popular during the Korean War. There is no question there. However, as before, the term evolved away from people and towards cars. You cannot be derogatory towards an inanimate object. It doesn't have a mechanism to internalize feedback. In that evolution, the term lost its derogatory connotations. The historical usage, while a part of our past, is used no more.
Reintroducing this to be something about a population's race reinstates the derogatoriness. You can be derogatory towards humans. Minimizing the cosmetic enhancements to be being inspired by the East Asian race and not valuable human achievement brings us right back to the same place we were when Japanese cars started being introduced into the North American market, diminishing the human contribution. It is a regression.
Old enough to watch this cycle from racism, to community, to memes, to racism, and now back to community