As a way to show off the capability of ligatures, more power to them. As an effort to censor, why in the ever loving fuck nuggets would you ever actually do that?
I have young kids and a large family. We all curse periodically. Instead of telling the kids that these are bad words, we told them they are adult words. As in, when you are old enough you can curse all you want, but as a kid you can’t. We felt that this was a more correct way to put it, and instead of making a huge deal out of them we instead taught them what is and what isn’t appropriate. You’d think this would result in them using those potty words all the time. Nope. I mean mostly no. Currently one of them asked one of the family members to stop using the word fuck because it makes her uncomfortable. The other one and I were playing Minecraft and I tried to explain the Nether to her as hell and she was like “wait is that a word I can say?” which led to us discussing when it’s ok and not ok to use that word. My girlfriend explained what “boss bitch” means to the kids recently in terms of dog mushing.
Some amusing stories: my oldest when she was in daycare made a pact with her classmates to go into the bathroom and say curse words because the teachers wouldn’t hear them in there. They even had someone on lookout when they did this. Words used were “poop” and “doodoo”.
That same kid when she was 4-5 came up to mom and asked “I really want to say a curse word”. Mom sent her to her room to say it no more than five times and come back. She did and that was that.
The other kid accidentally busted out with a periodic “what is this bullshit?” when she was much younger. She does not curse currently.
Words are words and censoring “bad” words is silly. You can’t censor meaning. “Fk you” is just as powerful a statement as “fuck you”. Especially if it censors words like “associating” or “Cummings” or “arsenal”. This is just fodder for the unnecessary censorship memes.
Around middle school, I decided that I would stop using swear words, because it seemed like getting myself in trouble by letting one slip out at an inappropriate time was more of a bother than just avoiding them and coming up with more inventive ways to express myself.
Refraining from curse words has been part of my character ever since, and just about everybody who knows me knows that I don't swear. And you know what? I have never missed those words. I have some of the most foul-mouthed friends you can imagine, and the words don't shock or scandalize me. They're just not a part of my vocabulary.
I have never, so far as I know, suffered a single negative consequence because I don't curse. But the benefits have gone far beyond never getting detention at school or grounded by my parents because of the use of salty language. For instance, it's led me to stretch myself creatively when I really need to express exasperation or any other strong emotion. And it's led me to notice that some swear words, far from being innocuous, can be really debasing, and to have empathy for those on the receiving end.
I'm glad that works for you, but the implication underneath is that no one "needs" to use swear words, and that they somehow make you a less interesting person. Again, glad that works for you, but everyone's needs differ, and making subtextual judgments about people's lack of ability to be creative without swearing is a little below the belt.
Personally I tend to mainly swear as an exclamation, and try not to use them when describing things or especially people. I don't think that's specific to swear words, though... I prefer not to trash talk people using any kind of language, though I'm certainly not perfect and I do it more often than I'd like.
This. People who swear do it so frequently it looses the power. It shows a lack of vocabulary more than any sort of moral failing. If you only swear rarely you get a lot more impact when you do, vs. the person who cannot avoid every 3rd word being a blue one.
Also, there are some truly eloquent swears out there!
It's the original definition of "vulgar" - "characteristic of or belonging to the masses." Hence, it became taboo for the upper classes to utter vulgarities, because it signaled lack of learning.
Am I suggesting you should do this with all your sentences? Absolutely not. However, I would certainly not read the two sentences the same.
(Food for thought: spices do not generally add nutritional value to food. Yet, each has their own preference as to whether, and how heavily their food should be spiced.)
> It shows a lack of vocabulary more than any sort of moral failing.
Here, now, I call nonsense on that one. I (probably?) swear more than most of my friends in private, casual communication circles. I also have a much greater vocabulary than any of them (this is not hubris --- I'm frequently told to explain words I use; I chalk this up to being better-read throughout my life). It just doesn't follow that because a person favors certain words, that they must not understand or feel comfortable with others.
I don't think vulgar goes along with basic, the four letter, Germanic versions of fornicate and defecate have a whole range of varied, nuanced, often contradictory meanings that capture the irreducible complexity of lived experience.
The Latin derived versions just make everything so bloodless, so focused on one particular aspect of the concept. They really are the simple words, even if they have more letters.
I'm amazed at British TV shows even whimsical gameshows where everyone swears like a sailor. But when someone dares to say the "c word" it's bleeped and everyone gasps.
ESL here. At school one teacher told us using swear words only show your lack of knowledge for better words. I took that to heart and the very few times I've used them, I really had no other option. However I've noticed swear words come more easily to me in English and don't feel as harsh as when I hear them in Spanish. I wonder if it's my lack of vocabulary.
There's actually been interesting research done about that idea, that people who swear have a smaller vocabulary or are less fluent. It seems that the opposite is actually true¹, people who swear are actually demonstrating a broader fluency. Worth a read!
I've never given credence to the "cursing == less articulate" either. It's knowing the impact dropping a curse can have to get people's attention. Plus, sometimes, people are just too dense to get how bothered you are, but drop a colorful phrase, and they tend to get the point. Like the George Carlin bit, take a word like "incredible" and it's a nice word. Stick fuck in the middle of it to make "infuckingcredible" and it's an even better word. Fanfuckingtastic > fantastic and is much more impactful than "most fantastic". Having said all of that, I have never told someone FU. That's my line.
well, people have misused grammar for ages <ducks>
Again though, that's the great thing about "swear" word. Shit can be good, shit can be bad, and shit can just be shit. Not being a grammarian, how many words other than curse words be a noun, verb and adjective all at the same time. buffalo comes to mind, but is just non-nonsensical when used.
It doesn't surprise me that people with larger overall vocabularies also have larger swear vocabularies. But the study you cite deals only with taboo word fluency, not with actual usage.
I would be curious whether high-vocab swearers diverge from low-vocab swearers in how they actually use bad language. In my experience, even my high-vocab friends drop f-bombs in substantially the same way that lower-vocab friends do. I don't buy the "lack of vocab" hypothesis, because no one smurfs swear words as a smurfy substitutes for inadequate vocab, but as for the "lazy language" hypothesis, I think it's possible to use curse words as a crutch even if you have the capacity to do otherwise.
And fluency doesn't necessarily indicate usage. I could rattle off many taboo words with which I am acquainted, but that doesn't mean I choose to use them.
I hypothesize that the "swearing => stunted vocabulary" argument is just a post hoc rationalization to give some justification for not liking bad words.
There are two distinct populations (in UK), those of poor vocabulary who use swearing all the time and don't seem capable of speaking in a nuanced way. And those who have the vocabulary to not swear, can still express themselves without expletives but choose to use them depending on the company/context they're in.
I found as a teenager that I'd swear to try and appear cool, and when I lacked sufficient nuance to my vocabulary to clearly express my feelings, and decided I wanted to do better.
I don't really care if you swear - except in front of children (because they have to learn not to swear in the wrong context when they can get in trouble from others who are more conservative) - but unless you demonstrate otherwise I'll assume it's lack of decent vocabulary.
Almost all people I've worked with who've sworn a lot (amongst general company) have had very low levels of education.
I don't really understand the whole "these words are shocking" attitude, eg cunt, people give simple utterances too much power.
I'd love to see something like the entropy of words actually used by people who use common crutch words (e.g. fucking, literally, whatever) more often (somehow correcting for the fact that people who use any set of words unusually often will have lower entropy).
I think it's a part of a broader challenge. In writing circles, there's always advice not to use some specific list of words. The list varies. An example list from a quick googling:
- really, very
- just
- totally, completely, absolutely
- thing
- some
- rather, quite, somewhat, somehow
- ...
Like all style advice, it's not really a "rule" to follow, but it's surprisingly difficult to avoid some of these words. I struggle with "really" and "just." It makes you work, but your language is better for it.
I think many swear words fall into this category of words that are really easy to use. These lists always heavily feature strengthening modifiers, and swear words are often strengthening modifiers. Especially "fucking" which is just a really fucking versatile thing to use.
I wouldn't say relying on these crutch words is a lack of knowledge or fluency, but maybe it's a lack of versatility and easy varied expressiveness. Relying on these crutch words makes it harder to be specific.
At work, we have a trillion custom slack emojis, and one is a big X with the caption “no-just”, encouraging people to refrain using just in sentences like “you just need to set up the Kafka consumer”.
Now that I’m writing this out, it sounds kinda dystopian , but I actually appreciate the doublethink. I believe that pruning “just” (and cousins like “really” “very”, “it” the direct object/noun, “something”) has increased the clarity of my writing.
I think that these words actually do have a use, but only in long recurring interactions where it’s clear that you don’t use these words in everyday communication. Humans are language detectives, and will detect these changes in speech as a signal of emotion. When you’re sincerely emotional about something, these normally vacuous words can be super meaningful. You can even use them in documentation (sparingly), to make a point.
There’s a Tao Te Ching verse about how the wise practice “not-talking”. The implication is that normalizing silence makes words more meaningful: words only carry meaning because they contrast with silence, so if you’re talking all the time nobody will listen to you. It’s a good idea with many implications and applications, and I think it applies to these words. :)
But "you need to set up the Kafka consumer" and "you just need to set up the Kafka consumer" have different meanings.
You're not just pruning, but changing the meaning. The latter implies there is only one thing you need to do, while the former is open ended, and could imply the beginning of a set of needs.
"Just" can also add emphasis. "That's stupid" and "that's just stupid" have different nuance.
Perhaps the intent is to not be belittling, or, relatedly, not imply that something should be trivial for everyone.
If someone replied to me that I "just need to set up the Kafka consumer" I'd have no idea how to do that, and would potentially feel embarrassed about needing to ask for further information.
Yeah you’re right. Most sentences don’t survive subtracting the word “just” exactly as they were written. It’s more food for thought. I agree it changes the meaning, and I wouldn’t advocate a universal ban (your example is evidence for the second half of my original post, I think).
Spanish-speaking at home but grew up in the US speaking english everywhere else.
I've wondered all my life why swearing feels less intense in Spanish than in English. Spanish broadcasts are rarely censored on TV or Radio. Maybe it is a cultural thing?
I am also bilingual. My pet theory is that it has to do with growing up, family authority over you as a child, etc. As a kid if you say a strong curse word you could likely get in trouble and it would be a memorable negative experience. But if you say it in a different language outside your family home there is rarely a negative consequence.
My family was particularly absurd: my mother wouldn’t curse and wouldn’t say the word for shit in Russian but would use the English word “shit” as a curse word. Go figure.
I'm Russian, though I moved to the US at age 5 so English is my 'native' language, even though it's technically not.
I see this on both sides. I find American curse words harsher than Russian ones, but my parents are the opposite. I can drop a "fuck" and no one really minds, drop a "suka" (roughly equates to "bitch" in Russian), my parents will loose their minds.
Same thing here. I think the difference is whether the swear words are ingrained as part of "absorbing" the language as a child, as opposed to learning it "properly" as an adult. Basically, whether you only understand their meaning rationally, or it's a deeply ingrained taboo.
Now imagine that you did use one of those swear words. Imagine the attention you would garner. People would know that something is dreadfully wrong.
My high school English teacher taught that all words can be used either skillfully or unskillfully -- swear words included. Knowing when to use the word and when not to use the word is part of having proficiency in the language.
Of course, trying to arrange your life so that you don't have to use that particular proficiency does seem like something good to aim for ;-)
I’ve chosen to give up profanity online, and it’s generally not a huge problem but I run into issues occasionally. I need to be creative when quoting people sometimes as I try to ship around their cursing. Certain phrases just lack i the right “oomph”: I might call someone impolite while really wanting to use another term.
I also don't cuss / use profane language. However, I have found a few idioms that just don't quite translate. For example, my co-workers laugh at me for saying "for kicks and giggles" instead of "s$!#s and giggles".
I've also seen people in leadership positions use a lot of foul language and it can really bring down the professionalism. As someone that doesn't use that language I find that avoid the trap of letting something slip in the wrong situation.
I mean really, if you stop to think about it, what does it mean to do things "for shits"? Is there a sensibly apparent meaning, or is it like the word "cool", where people attach meaning that the word doesn't formally have?
FYI, where I come from both phrases are considered reasonable. Without researching the matter, it isn't even clear to me that "shits and giggles" is the original phrase from which the other is derived. I suppose it's all a product of environment in the end.
I share the general sentiment though. I heard all kinds of "interesting" phrases growing up that didn't seem to be pointful. For example, people who would say "P.O.'d" in lieu of "pissed off", and become offended if you used the actual phrase. I always felt it was silly. Use the phrase or don't.
> Roman Moroni: I would like to direct this to the distinguished members of the panel: You lousy cork-soakers. You have violated my farging rights. Dis somanumbatching country was founded so that the liberties of common patriotic citizens like me could not be taken away by a bunch of fargin iceholes... like yourselves.
> Words are words and censoring “bad” words is silly. You can’t censor meaning. “Fk you” is just as powerful a statement as “fuck you”. Especially if it censors words like “associating” or “Cummings” or “arsenal”. This is just fodder for the unnecessary censorship memes.
One of my childhood friends kept calling his brother names. He was told off and told he couldn't do that any more... He promptly changed to call his brother by the name of cheeses.
His brother certainly instantly recognized that "gouda" etc. was just as clearly an insult as any of the other things he had been called, and got just as angry.
It's intent. I went to a boarding school, kids lived in 'houses' with housemasters. They were pretty good, not as dickensian as it sounds.
Depending on the housemaster, and provided you didn't make a habit of it you could call them wankers or more, occasionally get away with calling them a cunt. All relaxed.
But if you intended to offend then far lighter swear words would be taken much more seriously. You could get into trouble just for using the word 'bloody' if it was not meant in jest. Odd, but it worked in my view.
Couldn't agree more. They're just words. Sure, words that have been used to target particular groups of people to oppress and demean them shouldn't be used. But your garden variety swear words? Whatever.
> “Fk you” is just as powerful a statement as “fuck you”.
This always grates on me. Do people actually think they're not swearing, or the impact is less, simply because they leave out letters or replace some letters with a dash or asterisk? It just strikes me as childishness.
FWIW, I think you've done an excellent job of teaching your kids to develop a healthy relationship with swearing. I especially appreciate you going into the nuances of a word like "hell" with them; intent and context does matter. I wish there were more parents like you.
From a cursory examination of the site I deduce this is either a piece of satire or a silly joke (maybe both). So relax, this is not a serious effort to censor :-)
(Also I commend your child rearing technique vis-a-vis swearing. Seems a very sensible approach.)
I would further refine them from "adult" words to "coarse" words.
Everyone needs to know when to be polite and when to be coarse as various situations require. (It's a social skill.) Furthermore, they need to be capable of being polite when required.
As a child, you can't be allowed to be coarse all the time because learning politeness takes practice and work, so it'd be like skipping your homework in this area.
At some point, hopefully you've mastered that, and then can be a responsible person (probably an adult) who applies things as appropriate.
This is a really good take, and in my opinion strikes a needed balance between two extreme opinions that seem to be dominating this thread:
"Swear words don't matter at all, they're just words like any other word. You should teach them to your children and allow them to swear at home. Everyone should be able and willing to swear at all times and in all situations, even during diplomacy missions."
"Swear words are only used by ignorant and stupid people, because they immediately reveal that you have no better vocabulary for the situation. I don't use swear words ever, because I, an intelligent person, am always in control of my emotions and have a total grasp of the vocabulary of my native language."
Obviously these positions are exaggerated for comedic effect, but you do see some comments come pretty close! In my opinion, both fail to realize that in the normal course of human life we encounter a wide range of situations that call for formality or casualness. Not being too uptight about one's language can help smooth the latter, and it doesn't mean one isn't able to precisely control one's language in the former.
Swearing had a noticeable impact on my ability to use more nuanced and descriptive vocabulary and it has been really hard to undo. I've also noticed that not swearing and expressing things without expletives tends to make me more memorable to people, which seems beneficial in some circumstances.
That said, I'm all for not taking the loony puritan angle when it comes to language and kids.
While I am not for any kind of censorship, if someone doesn't know swear words, would they be able to use them? Is swearing orthogonal to human nature?
I had known few kids who didn't know what swearing was and they never did anything similar to swearing. Is there value in swearing? If not, what's the argument for letting kids learn about it?
It's an interesting thought. Would limiting the vocabulary lead to people expressing less.
Is there any controlled experiment on similar? Can this affect complex thoughts or they can still be conveyed?
Tangential, but I recall a pop sci write up of a paper that claimed the experience of pain was lessened if the experiencer was allowed to swear.
Fact-checking this claim is left as an exercise for the reader, sorry.
You're looking for the wonderful-sounding "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis", which is a great thing to trot out at dinner parties (if those ever become a thing again).
Kind of curious, isn't it? It gets around filters, but I assume that's not what you're talking about.
I imagine some people have psychological aversions to "filthy" words like this; and that seeing such substitute words is less uncomfortable for them. That does, however, beg the question: if the intent is to avoid giving offense, why not avoid the word in the first place?
Yes, I think it's a local site for local people and others who don't need that explaining. That may be more obvious from the home page. (Who is "he" amongst the contributors?)
I don't curse. I used to do lots of consulting work. Not cursing never seemed to hold me back. I also found I tended to be less angry then the often times it seemed idiotic folks who were always having big disasters and cursing.
In my line of work people were paying to get problems solved, not to hire someone who rants and raves. And some of the best money is in solving problems that others stomp around and rant about in my experience. If you reliably solve problems, your hourly rate goes through the roof in consulting.
I totally didn't value my time properly at the beginning ($25/hr!!) -> now it's incredibly higher - I've no idea what I was thinking at the beginning.
If you want to get paid a fair bit of money and are not some name brand genius (Steve jobs etc) I think you have to be someone folks are eager to work with, ask questions etc. I'm sure the psychologists would be able to expand on this.
For some, that means you don't laugh at them. For some who don't curse it may mean you don't say "F*ck" all the time. For some it's skipping lots of strong political talk when trying to do work. For some its being smart and being able to have an interesting conversation. For some it's having a clear technical opinion backed by experience (ie, you can provide good clear direction). For some its always trying to understand their problem before solving it.
A lot of the folks who say their behavior should be fine (ie, cursing, getting into politics) the point is that it's not per se wrong, it's just doesn't in my view lead to someone a large group of folks are eager to work with. Telling other people to be OK with your behavior (even if you are "right") is not always comfortable - and these folks can be very very confrontational and don't handle other views well often.
Censorship (in my opinion) has a time and a place. And it should always be a choice, never forced on you. This is an extremely controversial topic that seems to get a lot of people's emotions running hot, so please try and counter that before responding. In my opinion, censorship of media is a personal preference akin to food aversions. Picking the mushrooms out of a chef's dish isn't censorship, nor an insult to his art. It's personal preference.
For example, GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire series has a great story with tons of intrigue, but it is marred (in my opinion, don't all jump on me), by an over-reliance on sex jokes, explicit sex scenes, and extremely explicit violence/gore.
It turns out, you can tone down that stuff (using Calibre) and it makes the book so much better, (again, in my opinion) without losing anything of value. The story is still perfectly in tact, but now more stuff is left to the imagination (implicit instead of explicit). Instead of being described in great detail how a corpse is rotting in a cage and how the maggots are eating the various sex organs, it's now just a decaying corpse in a cage.
Same for movies. I enjoy watching censored (TV edited) movies with my teenagers, like "The Matrix".
I suppose it depends on what you consider valuable. Some details will matter more to some people than others.
Essentially, those details you're removing are flavor. Alright, so you don't like the particular flavor here. I'm not going to tell you that you should. There's a certain level of gratuity beyond which I lose appreciation as well. For my part though, I want the experience as envisioned by the author. If I don't like it, I'd rather avoid the content entirely, rather than censor it. This is because, to me, it's all interconnected --- the primary plot, the flavor, all the little details --- everything. I guess I'm a purist. I'm also not the type to pick ingredients out of a dish.
If you want to modify content for your personal consumption though, well, I don't see the harm in that. As you say, it's a personal choice.
Mainly by deleting explicit extraneous details so that more is left to the imagination.
"There was another dead man beyond the old one, a big red-bearded man with a rotting grey bandage covering his left ear and part of his temple. But the worst thing was between his legs, where nothing remained but a crusted brown hole crawling with maggots."
becomes
"There was another dead man beyond the old one, a big red-bearded man with a rotting grey bandage covering his left ear and part of his temple."
I personally find explicit gore like that revolting, and I also don't like reading explicit descriptions of sex organs and/or act of sex so I deleted them. I remove the explicit descriptions of the sex organs and act of sex, while leaving it clear that the characters are sleeping together.
I think this is based off the rather amusing story of someone writing an overzealous curse word filter that didn't allow people from Scunthorpe to write the name of their town.
I remember watching a interview where the curse words were bleat out on purpose. At the start the person was clear and easy to understand, but as the interview continued the person got angrier and angrier, and started to swear more. As time continue he was swearing more and more.
At the end of the interview the teacher said "Clearly he was angry, what was he angry about?". No-one could answer, swear words carry some emotions but they have NO useful information beyond that. The more person swears, the less they are communicating.
But the actual words were removed. It sounds as if it was presumed from the start that those words were without value, and that colored the whole presentation. The removal of the "valueless" words removed any chance of you inferring meaning through context.
Watch that same interview without the censorship, and you might well understand it. Watch another one, without any cursing, with random words censored, and you might have trouble understanding it as well.
I've tried to frame it with my kids in a similar way as automobiles and power tools. They're not bad words as much as strong ones, and could hurt people if used improperly.
When my daughter was about 5 we were on public transit and a bunch of teens were talking near us. Every second or third word was 'fuck' or 'shit'. My daughter asked why they talk that way. I told her it was because they didn't know enough words to say what they meant.
15 years later, she speaks two languages fluently and 2 more at about middle school level. She swears a little, but she knows how to say what she means.
That's just your victorian judgementalness coming out. It has nothing to do with vocabulary. And it certainly has nothing to do with how many languages your kid knows.
Anyone who grew up with conservative parents rolled their eyes at your post. "Ok dad".
Btw, she just learned to swear when you're not around. And when you eventually find this out, rest assured it's not that you failed her vocabulary, it's just because she met some friends that swear.
Of course she learned to swear from her friends. For better or worse, that's where most people I know learned to fit in with their peers and confuse their parents. That and older siblings who were a little farther along the path toward individuation.
What would you tell a five year old about the reason for nearly content-free conversation?
> Instead of telling the kids that these are bad words, we told them they are adult words. As in, when you are old enough you can curse all you want, but as a kid you can’t.
For some reason, I believed this when I was a kid without anyone ever telling me. That is why I never cursed as a kid and never discussed cursing with my parents.
Not really "adult words", we told them the truth - they are considered impolite and may cause offence. It's a question of social convention, after all.
Also, this font is clearly a bit of fun, not "an effort to censor"
I've always found it oxymoronic that "adult words" or "mature humor" are established when we are in our [pre]teens. These things typically don't have origins after coming-of-age.
IMHO swear words are strong words capable of causing impact, and which are strengthened through reserving them for when you really need them. If you swear all the time, you dilute that power. If you keep it in reserve, it retains its power to surprise. And so, somewhat ironically, the people who can swear best are those who swear least. People who swear all the time acquire a kind of linguistic impotence.
I went the other way with my kids, greatly expanding the scope of curse words.
Words are primarily tools of cognition—that is, they are how we hold concepts and use them to reason about the world. When we use words with other people, we are relying on their reason.
Curse words are bad for human life because they don’t mean anything in most contexts they are used.
“Fuck” can mean sex, but usually it’s emoting a non-specific range of emotions (as in “fuck you” or “infuckingcredible”). Most of its meaning comes from the sound it makes—you might as well bark and purr.
The only time a curse word is acceptable is when understanding the emotional state of the speaker is necessary to understand their words, but the speaker is unable to alter their vocal tone in the required manner. Counter-intuitively, this means that curse words may have a valid use in clarifying the meaning of written text. But this is very rare.
Using this standard, all euphemisms for curse words are equivalent in terms of their damage to human thinking—darnit is just as bad as dammit. The only difference is etiquette and manners; one is considered to be much less rude.
Interesting take. Can you explain more about why you hold the opinion that sounds that are meaningless are bad for human life, to the point of being unacceptable? In my experience a good sigh or happy noise are net positives.
Curse words are bad for human life because they seem like tools of cognition, but they aren’t. When used as words, they can only confuse and mislead you.
However, sounds that aren’t words can be very useful—they are perceptual evidence that we use in our reasoning. We identify groups of perceptions by differentiating them from other perceptions, integrate them into concepts based on their similarities, and assign words to represent all of concretes of that group.
So you have many “noise” experiences from yourself and in human interactions, identify some as happy, and now you have a useful new tool of cognition in the form of “happy noise”. With additional experience, you can refine that into many sub-concepts, like “pleasurable moan”, “contented sigh”, “silly giggle”, and so forth.
Curse words are different because they are just noise. If I say “happy noise”, you know broadly what I’m referring to. But if I say the word “fuck”, you have no idea what that word means—you would have to make guesses either based on the surrounding words that have semantic meaning, or based on how I said it using your conceptual knowledge of the kinds of noises.
That’s why you see curse words used in every kind of context as undifferentiated noise.
With my kids, I tell them that using any word they don’t understand is a curse word. It hurts their own life if they make the noise of advanced words they don’t yet understand, because it introduces ambiguity into their thinking.
For more information on the role of precepts and concepts in human cognition, I suggest reading “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”.
I once worked for an online game aimed at children. With some limited messaging and a forum, we needed to automatically filter swearing especially when it started to reach millions of users.
The initial limited English only blacklists were useless. Kids are creative and terrible. So we replaced with big processes of failover with several external swearword filtering services. Costly...
But kids are creative..., they write single letter messages that circumvent any automated filtering. Or rearranged their "room" with decoration that spelt out letters, or simply drew cock and balls, etc.
This font might have reduced the need for filtering. But kids are creative...
Thankfully it was not instant messaging. Direct near-instant messaging came in later products... Car-crash every time. Never write a messaging app for kids. There is always a mean-time-to-dickpick or worse.
Humans are basically symbolic representation generating machines. Trying to stop such a being from communicating ideas by limiting their available vocabulary in a particular language is short-sighted and massively underestimates humans in general. Maybe that's a fancy way of saying that the only thing that scales with the community is the community.
I've played a bit of https://skribbl.io/ recently and the votekick mechanism works very well for getting rid of people who just want to draw dicks and write swear words.
> Or rearranged their "room" with decoration that spelt out letters, or simply drew cock and balls, etc.
A whole Lego MMO was once cancelled because they couldn't come up with an automated way to detect such things in virtual Lego buildings and using employees to filter the content became too expensive.
I don't understand that at all. Just have a "warning to parents: this is a sandbox game and may feature any shape - including body parts - built from Lego". 99% of parents wouldn't be bothered, surely?
Every kid who has two opposite sex parents knows from toddler-hood what a penis and vulva look like, why is it such a problem??
I was speaking loosely, Western socio-cultural background, ignoring edge cases (body image problems like 'never nudes' and such) .. maybe you're right ..
I found it interesting at c.5-6 yo that our kids brought home school slang (new words to me!) for genitalia: showing they were talking about it in a non-scientific context, strongly suggesting they were talking in some way about opposite-sex genitalia with peers.
A lot of creative examples from Roblox (which may be what is referred here, dunno) is the 'go commit die' subreddit. I'm sure a lot of that is creative trolls instead of actual kids, but still.
Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet introduced me to the term "TTP" (Time To Penis), as a measure of how long before somebody makes a penis in an online, user-content based videogame
Inspired by you, I grepped my system words file in search of words containing fuck. What I didn't expect is Apple's /usr/share/dict/words comes pre-censored.
I can't find it now, but there was a post on HN where someone shared a report regarding their social media activity. It was compiled by a firm that offers to "research" potential employees.
If I remember correctly, it included a twitter account that was not obviously linked to the persons name.
There was an entry for every (re-)tweet that contained swearing, associated with a negative score.
Also, if you're swearing on public platforms, you almost never know if/how the platform itself may react. Maybe it affects the likelyhood of your contribution(s) being shown to others.
I don't doubt that this happens, but I think so much less of someone that would go into my Twitter and assign a negative ranking to each swearword in an effort to compile a metric of "me", that I wouldn't want to do business with them.
In that regard, adding more motherfucking swearwords in my bullshit comments serves as a great fucking way to deter any asshole cunt that thinks such metrics are a good goddamn idea. Dick pussy ass.
An interesting part of my kids playing CSGO is that they can now swear in at least 3 languages. I don't think you can play for more than a couple of days before you learn to swear in Russian (cyka blyat), it's practically synonymous with the game, a couple of weeks and you should know a Polish (kurwa) and a French swear (putain/merde).
And of course "fuck[ing]" and "shit" are used prolifically.
FUCK is still my default “Find>Replace>Find>Replace” placeholder. Need to shift a wad of spreadsheet cells laden with formulas but don’t want to risk anything?
Find All “=“ Replace with “FUCK”
Copy/Move
Find All “FUCK” Replace with “=“
Also handy for updating words or names when word processing.
The choice dates back to my first computer - I remember replacing all spaces “ “ with “FUCK” and watching gloriously as the assignment I had written was slowly turned into curse word gibberish.
I tell myself I still do it because (especially capitalised) it does stand out as an error in a way other placeholders may not. But it’s mostly for the fun and cheap thrill - pretty sure only one client ever got a document that I had left fucked up in this way.
[Edit to add: Nothing pseudonymous about my account name, but I’ll fucking own it.]
Call of Duty has censored all input with a regex like this for as long as I can remember. I can't even name one of my classes "Assault" which isn't even viewable publicly. You would think it would be easy to add a whitelist for such a common word.
I remember playing Ragnarok Online back in 2005ish. I was working on my merchant. Merchants had an ability to get better sale prices to NPCs, so one common way to make money by buying some item from players in bulk for more than they could get vendoring it, and you make margin on it by getting even more. Arbitrage!
My skills weren't high enough to compete with other merchants on the highest margin common items, so I decided to try one of the lower priced things. Squeeze into some kind of niche, you see.
Around this time, I discovered the censorship list was enforced client side (oh the wild west old days...),
To make a long story long, there were these crabs and they dropped an item called "nippers". They were kind of a cute thing because though that was what they were called by the game's creators, the game censored you for saying it. I removed "nip" from the list of gylphs, I could shout an offer to buy them without interference. This let me
buy these items from players without any competition. As the only dedicated purchaser, I was able to preserve a much higher margin.
Thanks to a soft monopoly preserved by regulations and information asynchrony, I was able to make significantly more money than I would have otherwise. That taught a lot of lessons to ~15 year old me. If only I could have applied those lessons in the real world!
I had occasion to write a chat server for a small gaming service once. The way I came up with to do the profanity filter ended up working a lot better than I expected it to, and avoided the problem you describe.
It worked like this.
1. Make a copy of the text to be filtered, modified as follows.
-- change upper case letters to lower case
-- change 0 to o, 1 to i, 3 to e, 5 to s, and vowels with various accent marks to the corresponding unaccented lower case vowel
-- discard anything else
For example, if the input was
start the assault. let's f-u-c-k them
it would become
starttheassaultletsfuckthem
2. Scan this for any substrings that are on the bad word list. In this case it would find "ass" and "fuck" [1].
3. If no bad words are found, the original string is returned and we are done.
4. For each word in the original string, look it up in the dictionary (I believe I used /usr/dict/words). Note the ranges of character positions in the original string of the words that are spelled correctly.
5. For each bad word found in the filtered string, if all of its characters came from positions in the original string that were part of correctly spelled words, leave it alone. Otherwise, asterisk out its characters in the original string.
In the above example, "ass" would be left alone because all of its characters came from "assualt" which is recognized as a correctly spelled word. None of "fuck" came from correctly spelled words, so it would get zapped. The final result would be
start the assault. let's *-*-*-* them
[1] Well...actually not. I just checked my archives and found the chat server bad word list. It did not include "ass".
just... be sure you're at least aware of the scunthorpe problem that this font is named after. do not implement an obscenity filter without being aware of the inconveniences they pose.
my name is woody (like the tom hanks cowboy, but also, i've been told, like the outdated euphemism for an erection) and i've been scunthorped out of creating accounts on dozens of sites because of my name. it's aggravating at the best of times, but doubly so when i want to be actually recognizable on the service in question.
I had occasion to write a chat server for a small gaming service once. The way I came up with to do the profanity filter ended up working a lot better than I expected it to, and avoided the problem you describe.
It worked like this.
1. Make a copy of the text to be filtered, modified as follows.
-- change upper case letters to lower case
-- change 0 to o, 1 to i, 3 to e, 5 to s, and vowels with various accent marks to the corresponding unaccented lower case vowel
-- discard anything else
For example, if the input was "Start the assault. let's f-u-c-k them" it would become "starttheassaultletsfuckthem".
2. Scan this for any substrings that are on the bad word list. In this case it would find "ass" and "fuck" [1].
3. If no bad words are found, the original string is returned and we are done.
4. For each word in the original string, look it up in the dictionary (I believe I used /usr/dict/words). Note the ranges of character positions in the original string of the words that are spelled correctly.
5. For each bad word found in the filtered string, if all of its characters came from positions in the original string that were part of correctly spelled words, leave it alone. Otherwise, asterisk out its characters in the original string.
In the above example, "ass" would be left alone because all of its characters came from "assualt" which is recognized as a correctly spelled word. None of "fuck" came from correctly spelled words, so it would get zapped. The final result would be
start the assault. let's *-*-*-* them.
[1] Well...actually not. I just checked my archives and found the chat server bad word list. It did not include "ass".
What happens if a string has two potential ligatures? For instance, if there was a ‘abc’ ligature and a ‘bcd’ ligature, how would ‘abcd’ be rendered? Is there a priority/hierarchy?
That sounds unlikely, ligatures are two or more consecutive graphemes graphemes joined into a single glyph, but only visually. The underlying text is unmodified, so as far as the renderer is concerned, the text is still "arsenal".
No. I mean first the "arse" rule is applied, and then the "anal" rule (because this didn't exist previously and because the blanked out letters are ignored) is applied next
There is a video [0] about this censoring-"problem" by Youtuber Tom Scott. He talks about how it's impossible to implement with all edge-cases, easy to circumvent and thus usually not a good idea. Fittingly, the video is filmed in Peniston.
If you play any video game that is multiplayer online you will know it's impossible.
All these large companies Riot, Blizzard, Valve, etc implement censoring tools. People just swear over voice or add random characters to swear words or swear in different languages.
It really doesn't matter what they do, people will still swear.
I think Riot did ok actually, at least when I used to play LoL you can disable the filter. That means those who do swear can just use their normal vocabulary and not have to invent ways around the filter, and those that haven't disabled it get a still decent censored experience.
> "Seen" is a typeface that is concerned with privacy and the interception of our communications by the NSA. It automatically strikes through spook words.
It kind of sucks that in the source code of the page though they have to use asterisks instead of the literal swears, presumably in case the browser that's viewing the page doesn't load the font for some reason.
I'm not expressing an opinion on the practice, but in case a child who doesn't know the word reads it?
I can remember as a child reading a story in a UK tabloid newspaper that quoted (Neil Kinnock, I think) with some asterisks in some of the words, and not fully understanding.
I'm a little impressed that it still works even if you add some zero-width spaces in the middle of a swear word. People will work around whatever restrictions you put in place; this is just for fun :)
Never mind the ligature gag... the source font, Aileron, is lovely. Like a modern version of Rail Alphabet, the Helvetica-derived British Rail corporate font.
I find myself wondering whether a similar technique could be used to create a font that censors the vowels in God and related words for Jewish readers, due to their taboos regarding vowels in the name of God.
Mishit is censored too... I like the number of HN commenters who tried out their favorite Scunthorpe variations.
As somehow who designed an implementation of \b for an NFA-based regex matcher (https://github.com/intel/hyperscan) I always have an appreciation for the Scunthorpe problem; we did see quite a number of scam/spam/bad-word detection regex patterns that tried to avoid it with word boundary stuff.
That was 12 years ago, and sadly the Google link to searching for the word now links to countless articles about the phenomenon, instead of actual examples (I gave up after the 5th page.) Several years ago I could still find them, I remember there being an entire mailing list that was censored in that way.
It flabbergasts me to find out that, by 2018 [1], people who are making decisions apparently still hadn't figured out that attempting to censor things (including people's names, of all things) using substring matching doesn't work and is a bad idea.
I mean... I understand that when we were experimenting with things on the internet in 1996 that might have come as a surprise because, you know, you just don't think of everything. But 25 years later?
Amusingly enough, the spelling of the original word became very easy to remember after seeing that, and the phrase that I made up to keep that was "two asses in a nation".
Many many years ago I wrote a sign up form (an app now I suppose) for a UK ISP, and we, I cannot remember who wanted the feature, write a simple blacklist of words that users should not be allowed to put in their addresses, and of course we whitelisted Scunthorpe (as well as several other rude placenames in the UK post office address file)
Just weird how the same things come round and round.
I cut my teeth as a junior dev in the 80's writing soundex filters for the same purpose, which was repurposed to do auto correction of street names after I got it working on swear words... always amuses me to see so much effort put into such things even still today (as I struggle with autocorrect while typing one-handed due to a broken arm...)
It is, I think, based around the need to understand
the context to understand if it is a swear word, part of "reasonable" conversation or unwanted trolling.
And we are still a long way from AI so a long way from a generic solution - as such everyone must roll their own for their specific needs and trade offs
This might actually be a good way to make people self -censor. When a word suddenly blacks out they will wonder what they have triggered and maybe think twice before sending it because either they know they’ve crossed a line or it’s dubious the software will accept their text as written. Just like you showing people their ip addresses has proven a significant deterrent for attempting credit card fraud, masking out the undesired language might have the same effect. the beauty of doing it in. The font is its a mechanism nobody expects, someone is going to waste a lot of time figuring out how it works. I don’t see a GitHub project, I’m wondering if the list of words can be expanded to include non-English languages.
Soo... the ligature trick is relatively old news - but I was somewhat surprised by the font not censoring "Scunthorpe". (And my suspicion is that this ability was what they were actually showing off)
That would make sense. I wasn't aware, overlapping ligatures were permitted. I wonder how well-defined this is though. I.e. will the ligature for the longest substring always "win", or if this is implementation-defined?
It’s funny that Pink Floyd were having a go at MW back on Animals — she did a good job of getting under the skin of several decades of young people apparently.
This is shamelessly off topic but what’s the best tool right now for using open type features (like ligatures) for PDF typesetting from simple ascii text?
I’m using asciidoc which has thankfully recently shipped hyphenation support, but I don’t think it supports ligatures. They feel like another must have for beautiful typesetting.
I’m wary of TeX because I find it so hard to get the stylised results I want for our org (a school) but should I be less afraid? TeX based tools always felt content first, which is laudable, but presentation fanciness is a requirement when one works in pitching — in this case to school children.
I had this exact idea after they squirt gunned the gun emoji. I am surprised regime’s haven’t pushed something like this to block words like Tiananmen.
Lol, like how when it loads you see the hidden text and then it disappears.
Another option might be better to process the text, swap out each letter with for example X — or even better a ID-key, then render the font you made.
If you used the ID-key, you could even encrypt each key, tag them by type (spoilers, swear words, personal info, etc) - though for obvious reasons that would require server-side code.
https://www.glyphrstudio.com/online/ is a free online font editor that lets you do this. You can either create a font from scratch or load an existing one (ttf, otf, or svg). It wouldn't censor a word like "associating".
"In February 2004 in Scotland, Craig Cockburn reported that he was unable to use his surname (pronounced "Coburn") with Hotmail. Separately he had problems with his workplace email because his job title, software specialist, contained the substring Cialis, an erectile dysfunction medication commonly included in spam e-mails."
Now that's just bad luck. It could've happened to any of us!
"It irks me how admins always ban my buddy, presumably because they think 88 in his nick is code for 'heil Hitler'. It's really unfair. Take care viagrapenis88!"
I live not too far from Scunthorpe and heard a story that Scunthorpe county council rolled out a new spam filter on the own email servers and no one in the council could sent any emails that day as they all got blocked.
This was a few decades ago and I can’t find a source but there are references to the origin here:
My first experience with this kind of brute force solver for a problem that isn't really a problem was actually 'wristwatch', not 'scunthorpe'. This was in the very early 1990's, and on a BBS, not an Internet-based system.
But I gather Scunthorpe was the first widely reported example.
Yoshitsuna. I see this false positive on other sites all the time. It needs to exclude censored words that are part of others by checking for white space on the sides. And that won’t work with ligatures at the very beginning of text.
Then you need the censorship to be voluntary, so people aren’t tempted to circumvent it.
There are at least 3 transliteration systems for Japanese. Writing foreign languages with 26 Latin letters usually loses some nuance and shows some bias towards the pronunciation of the authors' native language.
It has also become a loan word in English, so there's at least a de facto convention of how it is spelled with latin characters in English text. It's not written in kanji when used in English.
The author links to a Wikipedia article, which lists many common “censoring” mistakes, to show they have overcome one of those, but all others I’ve tried from the article are indeed incorrectly “censored”.
I mean, if you pulled it out on a discussion not about swear words or something like that in civilized society, civility would go out the window (because you would've tossed it out the window), so it seems _more_ of a swear word to me in modern times than the ordinary fuck, shit, etc
Funny story. We suspended a middle schooler earlier this year because he was heard using that word in close proximity to a black teacher. When approached, he swore he had stubbed his toe and cried out n*r in agony. The disciplinarian and I were discussing it and I was adamant that we could forgive his using any other verbiage, up to and including sob or the f-word in that context, but that I could never in a million years believe that anyone would use that particular slur after stubbing a toe or getting a paper cut.
Fag##t is also not censured. It is one of the core problems: Not enough diverse people involved in those projects, and the outcome is showing that the only thing "wrong" in calling someone "f###ing fag##t n#####r" is the first word, the two other ones are "fine" or "depends on context" as other mentioned in this thread. Go thoughts and intention, but needs support on execution.
Those saying you're taking this too seriously are wrong - the project is a joke, but the issues you highlight aren't.
I made the font, and if it was a serious attempt at a moderation tool or trying to comprehensively cover 'bad words' then such slurs would certainly be included. But it's VERY limited in scope, there's just enough for the joke to work (core 4-letter words plus a set of words people grumbled were missing) and it's focused around what most people would consider to be everyday swearing (rather than discriminatory or highly contextual terms). I also felt that adding slurs to such a limited word list would risk highlighting them & encouraging their use to make 'funny' screenshots etc
Please keep questioning these things, I'm well aware that even silly projects can raise serious issues and try to give them enough thought.
You might have never experienced the intersectionality of being both. In any case, is it really yours to judge? Anyways, your comment is precisely the point I'm making: most people working on these projects are not necessarily aware of the underlying issues that people actually suffer from. They under play some, simply because they have not experienced it. Not complaining though, this is better than not doing anything, but we need to setup better ways to pull-in more diversity on these projects.
I have young kids and a large family. We all curse periodically. Instead of telling the kids that these are bad words, we told them they are adult words. As in, when you are old enough you can curse all you want, but as a kid you can’t. We felt that this was a more correct way to put it, and instead of making a huge deal out of them we instead taught them what is and what isn’t appropriate. You’d think this would result in them using those potty words all the time. Nope. I mean mostly no. Currently one of them asked one of the family members to stop using the word fuck because it makes her uncomfortable. The other one and I were playing Minecraft and I tried to explain the Nether to her as hell and she was like “wait is that a word I can say?” which led to us discussing when it’s ok and not ok to use that word. My girlfriend explained what “boss bitch” means to the kids recently in terms of dog mushing.
Some amusing stories: my oldest when she was in daycare made a pact with her classmates to go into the bathroom and say curse words because the teachers wouldn’t hear them in there. They even had someone on lookout when they did this. Words used were “poop” and “doodoo”.
That same kid when she was 4-5 came up to mom and asked “I really want to say a curse word”. Mom sent her to her room to say it no more than five times and come back. She did and that was that.
The other kid accidentally busted out with a periodic “what is this bullshit?” when she was much younger. She does not curse currently.
Words are words and censoring “bad” words is silly. You can’t censor meaning. “Fk you” is just as powerful a statement as “fuck you”. Especially if it censors words like “associating” or “Cummings” or “arsenal”. This is just fodder for the unnecessary censorship memes.