There's a story of a company that was selling a box to connect to your TV that'd take the closed captioning signal, and on detecting "vulgar" or "offensive" language, it'd bleep out the sound and replace the captions with something less offensive.
Supposedly an early version would bleep out Dick van Dyke and replace it with Jerk Van Gay.
The jokes about Dick Van Dyke's name are very old (but usually they use Penis Van Lesbian), so it was quite likely just a variant used by the company itself as a PR sound-bite to get people to write about them. It seems like it worked - it appeared in quite a lot of news stories and some are still online:
Yes, to be clear I wasn't suggesting the boxes didn't exist, just that their "cute" story about their early problems was a bit close to a very, very old joke and seemed like it might well be intentional PR spin. The company is still around:
Right, I was just confirming that they have been seen in the wild.
I also have doubts because I can't see their customer base ever being ok with the word "penis", regardless of whether it is a medical term. So I can't see them making that substitution in their dictionary. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if they outsourced it and only provided a list of words to substitute that was incomplete and left choosing the substitutions up to the dev.
Supposedly an early version would bleep out Dick van Dyke and replace it with Jerk Van Gay.
The jokes about Dick Van Dyke's name are very old (but usually they use Penis Van Lesbian), so it was quite likely just a variant used by the company itself as a PR sound-bite to get people to write about them. It seems like it worked - it appeared in quite a lot of news stories and some are still online:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-nov-25-ca-47459...
https://www.chicagotribune.com/1999/03/01/v-chip-be-darned/