At a startup earlier in my career, we generated an email address for every customer which they could use to interact with our system. The CEO wrote a script to pick words at random from the Princeton Wordnet database.
One afternoon I thought, wait a minute, what's actually in Wordnet?
Needless to say, many apology emails were sent later that day.
In recent years, I created a homework assignment for a security class where the student's job is to crack a set of password files. First easy, un-salted hashes, then salted hashes, ... etc.
To illustrate the badness of using dictionary words as a password, I randomly generated a unique password file for each user by sampling from /usr/share/dict/words.
> One afternoon I thought, wait a minute, what's actually in Wordnet?
I know exactly how you feel. It took me about 5 minutes to find Shutterstock's list of dirty, naughty, obscene, and otherwise bad words [1], and about 20 more minutes to add a blacklist check to my script.
Fortunately none of the students had actually been given a bad word. Whew!
One afternoon I thought, wait a minute, what's actually in Wordnet?
Needless to say, many apology emails were sent later that day.