Nobody in my middle and high school had any idea "gimp" had an English meaning. I assume if anyone knew, we kids would at least occasionally joke about it (we used gimp for various projects).

It was long after university after I learned that it's also an English word.

Even worse, I assumed for years that the primary meaning of gimp was bullfinch. See, in German the bird is called a Gimpel. Never bothered to look it up until reltively recently.

BTW: Wikipedia is great for translating technical jargon: the language links invariably lead you to the correct disambiguation of a lemma.

I don't know why people keep making this point as if it matters; it sounds like you might be trying to absolve the creators or something.

But again, the people who gave the name to the project deliberately chose it because they found its slight offensiveness to be funny.

They knew what they were doing and chose to continue to do it anyway.