msprange said:
It is spelled correctly. It was changed because a) some people _could_ take offence and b) it is still pronounced the same way, so the change is small.
:shock:
I don't believe I'm hearing this. This is a game that has been around for decades, and as far as I know nobody has
ever complained about it (and you even admit that nobody has actually taken offence).
I cannot imagine how anybody could be offended at Kafer. It is german for "beetle", and used for obvious reasons, since the Kafers look a bit like like beetles. It doesn't look or sound anything like any offensive word that would be appropriate in that context. The only things I could find were "kaffir", which is a racist term in some african countries, and "kafir" which is arabic for "unbeliever". I doubt that anyone who is actually
offended by those terms would even be aware of the game existing in the first place, and even if they did I doubt that they'd actually be offended by it.
By this logic, you need a different word for "ship", because you can replace the "p" with a "t" and get a swearword that some people are offended by. Don't tell me you've done that too, have you?
This is nothing more than random political correctness taken too far, and I think it is moronic. If you had a genuine concern about it you could have put an umlaut over the a to make
Käfer, which is even more obviously not an offensive word and still actually german. Or are accents too expensive for print?