> The problem was named after an incident in 1996 in which AOL's profanity filter prevented residents of the town of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, England, from creating accounts with AOL, because the town's name contains the substring "cunt".[1] In the early 2000s, Google's opt-in SafeSearch filters made the same error, preventing people from searching for local businesses or URLs that included Scunthorpe in their names.[2]
“Fugging (German: [ˈfʊkɪŋ] (listen)), named Fucking until 2021, is an Austrian village in the municipality of Tarsdorf, located in the Innviertel region of western Upper Austria. The village is 33 km (21 mi) north of Salzburg and 4 km (2.5 mi) east of the Inn river, which forms part of the German border.
Despite having a population of only 106 in 2020, the village has drawn attention in the English-speaking world for its former name, which was spelled the same as an inflected form of the vulgar English-language word "fuck". Its road signs were a popular visitor attraction and were often stolen by souvenir-hunting vandals until 2005 when they were modified to be theft-resistant. The name change to Fugging, which is pronounced the same in the local dialect, was rejected in 2004 but passed in late 2020.”
Reminds me of Paranoia Sans "a self-censoring, conspiratorial typeface that will automatically redact more than 150 words popular in conspiracy myths/theories."
My only guess would be that it for some reason picks up on 'lie' within the word while you're typing it out, changing in to 'TRUTH', and then blanks when it detects 'aliens'.
Definitely not. The US was highly censored when it comes to language until the 1990s. [1] We improved considerably, including in (and thanks to) not censoring the WWW when it exploded onto the scene in the 1990s. It can be done again, as there will be a massive cultural backlash against the hyper over-sensitive woke era. The pendulum always swings back aggressively. The new rebels are, once again, going to be those that are intellectually free, not self-censoring and not over-sensitive. The US is becoming primed for a new era of shock, and young people will eat it up when it happens, to rebel against the hyper sensitive status quo.
[1] See: George Carlin and Howard Stern, and their running battles with abusive government censorship and cultural repression around language.
I hope it will happen, but the pendulum is going back so fast right now. Some old words are being more accepted now, but people are becoming more sensitive to whole topics and specific trigger words, even and especially young people.
Careful what you wish for - in all likelihood when that backlash does come you and I and anyone old enough to be commenting here won't be in on the joke.
We will be the ones the shock-jocks are trying to shock, as they goose-step through their live goetze show, calling for math to be abolished from the high school curriculum and for script-kiddie porn to be legalized.
And their adoring fans will get together to vote in president R. Kelly for 2 terms.
> The 1st Amendment is one of the strongest legal protections on speech in the world.
Just as long as that speech isn't pornographic. Or advocating direct harm towards a protected class. Or perceived to be threatening towards an elected official...
The 1st amendment may have been intended as an absolute, but courts have typically interpreted it with a fair amount of leeway.
That the 1st Amendment is not an absolute protection on all speech does not change the fact that it is one of the strongest protections that does exist.
Additionally, the Supreme Court has protected porn under the 1st Amendment countless times. I doubt that any serious person wants threats of violence to be universally legal.
In paper is right and aims right. In practice we can discuss your claims but it's still one of the best (or more fairly, less worst) implementations in human history so far.
And what's the alternative anyway? Some kind of Newspeak (with an officially approved typography)?
Any of the other implementations of the same concept found in most of the western world, take your pick. Whatever criticism you have of them, I'll probably be able to point that it also applies to some application of the FA (or of how speech is/was allowed in practice) in the united states.
I think the primary intent for the First Amendment and best indicator how US is different from most places is how in the US anyone can freely say whatever is on their mind about anything government. Okay, sure, except for the hate speech such as calls for violence, obviously. Or make a sort of a statement by desecrating national symbols - such as burning the flag or flying it upside down. And fear no legal persecution.
People are people - they have emotions and whenever they argue politely or swear profusely they must not be persecuted for being upset with something. Even if they're most terribly wrong.
I found this nice summary table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insult_of_officials_and_the_st... (sure, Wikipedia can be wrong, but I think this table should be accurate enough). It's all "no" only in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Georgia, Ireland, Romania, Slovakia and the United States. This is a minority, surely not "most of the western world".
> Okay, sure, except for the hate speech such as calls for violence, obviously.
Hate speech is protected speech, as well as calls for violence (in limited circumstances); the standard for when speech is not protected is the event of 'imminent lawless action'. So, for instance, if you're in a lynch mob, and you yell to lynch a specific person, that's not protected, but if, e.g., you're marching down the street yelling to kill all the Jews, that is still protected speech (see National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie).
> Or make a sort of a statement by desecrating national symbols - such as burning the flag or flying it upside down.
These are also constitutionally protected speech. Some places still have laws on the books regarding this, and some overzealous police departments might try to enforce them, but they would never hold up in court.
> see National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie
Oh, I didn't knew about this. Nice, it's even stronger than I thought. Thanks!
> These are also constitutionally protected speech.
Yeah, I've used those as examples of that. I know government doesn't fancy it and there are attempts to make this sort of desecration illegal now and then, but they're all ruled down in the end.
People were arrested and imprisoned for distributing leaflets opposing the draft. The First Amendment didn't help them much, despite remaining completely unchanged for the past 250 years.
Your example of America not having free speech is a case from a century ago which has been overturned since then. Not going to bother responding to any further replies since you obviously aren't arguing in good faith.
Has anything about the FA changed over the past century? Why do you think the current stronger interpretation of it is not a passing fad? Why do you assume that rights strengthen over time? We just had a plethora of examples to the contrary.
Your argument is that the 1st Amendment is not one of the strongest legal protection of speech in the world?
I'm not well versed in other nations' approach as it pertains to free speech. Can you enlighten me in terms of how other countries provide legal protection for speech in a way that you perceive to be "stronger" than the U.S? I can't imagine a functioning code of laws that allows for yelling fire in a crowded theater whose nation isn't straight up incapable or corrupt.
>The United States allows for yelling fire in a crowded theater
I don't understand.
According to the article you yourself link to, the phrase, in the US, has been a metaphor for conduct not protected by the first amendment for over a hundred years.
All that seems to have changed is the exact definition of "clear and present danger".
Is there a case you know about where someone literally falsely yelled fire in a crowd and it was deemed protected speech in the US?
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of s***ch, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to ***emble, and to pe***ion the Government for a redress of grievances."
I often find people expressing that sentiment mean only the words they happen to be cool with, and on examination say well obviously we should still censor those words.
I never find this. Isn't it quite weird to spend time thinking about which words should or should not be censored? How about we just leave people to speak their minds instead of slowly but surely meandering into newspeak?
No more weird than spending time thinking about what other behaviours should or should not be censored (criminalised). Should harming people with words be separate from harming people with actions? Is it the case that blaring a loud noise at night is harmful enough to be banned, but putting racist leaflets through letterboxes is harmless?
What about online forums where it's not about moralistic control, but a pragmatic action because if you don't censor some kinds of words and speech, it's like a positive feedback loop where everything gets more intense until Godwin or his equivalents turn up? It does seem to be the case that control feedback is needed to keep discussion forums relevant and on topic, and that involves thinking about what needs censoring and by whom and in which situations. Does that same effect and consideration not apply in wider society?
This is naive. Even if you can make yourself immune, you can't influence those around you. I barely care about words like "shit" and "fuck" but I can't stand lying because there will always be somebody who falls for it and starts treating you negatively because of it. And that's how harm using words turns into harm using actions.
Of course you can't censor lies automatically. Toxicity doesn't have a technical solution.
Even if you could demonstrate the long term impact on somebody's mental health and sense of self worth through constant name calling was worse than the short term impact of, say, busting their nose?
(But I agree censorship isn't likely to help prevent the former. I assume physical abuse is subject to criminal charges far more often than mental/ verbal abuse is largely because damage from the latter is far harder to prove in court)
> "Absolutely, YES! People should be resilient against words and name-calling"
Maybe. Maybe not. If you choose to educate yourself about financial scams, and are always wary when strangers call you, that's sensible given the world we live in. If you see pensioners being scammed out of their life savings and support doing nothing because "I would never let that happen to me, they should take responsibility like I do" that's naieve at best and maybe cruel.
Similarly, a society full of media which insults and swears at people because "people should toughen up" is like refusing to clean dogshit off the streets because people should just wear shoes. Great, now you have people trampling dogshit everywhere, what a success.
Like, yes you should lock the door of your house when you go out. But isn't it interesting that there are places where people don't have to? Wouldn't that be ... nice? Better? Do we really want to encourage a society full of people who are wary, calloused, defensive, always on edge, because doing something about it would be 'weak'?
> Should harming people with words be separate from harming people with actions?
I don’t think so, so let’s treat the two cases similarly. We can forbid harming people with words without forbidding words altogether, just as we do for cars, knifes, hands, etc.
Context matters. In the right context, said in the right tone, “Yeah, beauty” can be quite an insult.
Thankfully, I haven't. Telling someone who was physically assaulted that at least they weren't murdered isn't much comfort. If you're saying "the amount of harm they do is different", I agree. If you're saying "people can't be harmed by words", I disagree - especially at a population level; popularising and spreading of ideas that certain subgroups are subhuman has happened over and over in many countries and caused lots of harm. Punching someone is worse than calling them a moron, but bruises from childhood heal in weeks where verbal assault from childhood (e.g. by an abusive parent or teacher, as well as by peers) can still be hurting decades later with wider knock-on effects.
I think people very generally miss the very important subtlety that words never hurt people. It's the intention behind the words that hurt and you don't need words to communicate intent. So banning/censoring words really doesn't do much other than placate the people who just wanted to feel involved in changing the status quo.
Compare that to a punch to the face. It really doesn't matter if someone was just joking or angry with you, 150 psi to your jaw is going to do damage.
"Only someone who is so privileged as to have never been physically assaulted could think that it doesn't cause life long physiological and psychological damage"
Depends entirely on the degree and nature of the assault. I was beat up badly at school at least a few times, I'd dare suggest if anything it made me stronger, and certainly can't think of anything likely longterm damage it's caused. But I certainly don't presume it's the same for all kids.
I don't think phsyical assault cannot cause lifelong damage. Is it a terrible weakness of my privilege that I would like a society where other people have such a good life as I have had, instead of a difficult stressful dog-eat-dog life to try and toughen them up to survive a dog-eat-dog life? As if that's my business?
> "I was beat up badly at school at least a few times, I'd dare suggest if anything it made me stronger"
Overcoming challenges builds character, but wouldn't it be nicer if you chose the challenges? If you had built strength by choosing to do Karate and learn Mandarin instead of being badly beaten up being foisted upon you? Women report being catcalled from puberty around age 13; is your response to that "if anything it makes them stronger; women who didn't get catcalled are just privileged and weak"?
Who said that was my response??
I totally agree that physical AND mental/verbal abuse should be chargeable offenses. I'm less sure why the former is necessarily always worse than the latter, but it's sure easier to prove the damage in court.
>bruises from childhood heal in weeks where verbal assault from childhood (e.g. by an abusive parent or teacher, as well as by peers) can still be hurting decades later with wider knock-on effects.
That's like saying physical damage from a rape will heal in weeks but verbal sexual harrassment can still be hurting decades later.
You're trying to say that I'm suggesting verbal sexual harrassment is worse than rape because it lasts longer? But you're ignoring that rape involves psychological traumas of losing trust in people, nightmares, loss of bodily autonomy and control, being afraid to go out in some situations, or to some places, which lasts much longer than the physical damage (of a non-violent rape). If you include those things then you have both types of attack having mental harm and rape having more of it (because of the intimacy and intensity and loss of control, among other things) and rape having physical harm too, which makes rape worse.
> but verbal sexual harrassment can still be hurting decades later.
In the vein of putting words in peoples mouths, you think this is a positive good thing and a reason you support verbal sexual harassment because it will toughen people up for decades? (I suspect not).
Yes to all of those, and verbal attacks are often incitement or a precursor to physical attacks. I think anyone with security experience could summon numerous examples from memory.
Some words have specifically pejorative or derogatory meanings, and if general swears are considered acceptable I'm afraid there are people who will exploit that for genuinely offensive purposes.
As someone from a culture with normalised swearing, yes this happens sometimes. However dickheads are dickheads, and will abuse and exploit regardless of the rules.
Is it less offensive to use the n-word with explicit intent to offend by saying “n-word” or by actually saying the word?
I think it’s the same. ie: it’s not the word that’s the problem, it’s how you use it.
To expand further: I think the obsession over words is the left’s version of thoughts and prayers. We would rather debate what something should or shouldn’t be called than fix the problem. Because it’s easier and feels like progress.
Censoring words is much more the right's obsession than the let's. You're right in the particular case of the n-word, and slurs in general, but the conservative right has been adamant in banning all use of swear-words in mass media for decades.
You are right and I think censoring swear words is even sillier.
Although it does lead to the particularly beautiful art of the British swear word. How they can turn any random noun into an insult is pure poetry. I wish American media did more of that.
"MyPillow CEO’s free speech social network will ban posts that take the Lord’s name in vain" - “You don’t get to use the four swear words: the c-word, the n-word, the f-word, or God’s name in vain,” - https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/14/22383841/mike-lindell-soc...
In 2022 America, those two groups are welded at the hip, and the latter are steering the boat, while the former smiles and nods. It's a distinction without a difference.
There are plenty of people who are politically conservative but don’t have particularly strong religious beliefs. Not every republican is anti-abortion and pro-prayer in school no matter how the media portrays them.
You should meet some real people sometime and see how the other half lives.
—edit—
Though…if you don’t look like you walked straight off the set of Duck Dynasty they are probably closet conservatives and won’t risk offending some random stranger with their “hate speech” because that’s what ‘merica has become.
the topic originally under discussion being self-censorship, it is an expertly subtle reference to how things like rape (especially child rape), while not directly censored in the same way as expletives, are very rude subjects to bring up in polite conversation
Definitely not a US-only thing. Every time there's an article on BBC about someone getting in trouble for saying something offensive they often don't even provide a quote of what was said.
I hate when games have no option to turn word filter off. Souls games are infamous of the word Knight getting censored, the word filter is so bad most people invading are just asteriks
Reminds me of a Udemy Unreal Engine course where the instructor would pronounce
APawn*
as "APawn star", which Udemy's subtitle generator would suitably render as "a ** star".
How deeply narcissistic arrogant and selfish one should be to see all the harm that comes from a free-for-all and still promote a free-for-all because you think you'll be one of the winners and other people's suffering doesn't matter?
Hiding from reality via censorship sets one up for even greater harm and suffering, because they never have a chance to build up their mental strength and armor that they will need in the real world.
Like never letting your child ever ride a bike without training wheels.
It's a form of agoraphobia.
Kevin Hart talks about the fact that no one can insult or harm him with words because of the initiative gauntlet he went through to become a comedian.
More like never letting your child ride a bike with training wheels because falling off builds character, and when they grow up they're bound to be falling off a lot and need the callouses to protect them.
Did your parents skip your childhood vaccinations on the grounds that a bout of polio or tetanus builds physical strength? Or did they prefer a more gentle introduction to let your immune system become accustomed in a protected, simplified, environment?
Note that, that unfounded accusation of indifference (and the rest of the unfounded accusations) to other's people suffering comes with the additional layer of arrogance of taking as granted that censorship is a valid solution that will not have consequences even worst than the original problem.
It's like putting the most incompetent engineers in charge of architectural decisions in a system design and giving for granted that a service that is scaling fast and adding features to it will deliver 99.9999% uptime.
Note that, that unfounded accusation of arrogance and authortarianism and narcissism comes with the additional layer of arrogance of taking as granted that censorship is bad and avoiding it will not have consequences even worse than doing it.
Society puts/accepts restrictions on citizens behaviour for the wider good of society. Exactly which restrictions, on whom, and when, are always a matter of negotiation and shifting priorities. The classic example being someone shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater when there is no fire. Banning someone from your theater for doing that for a laugh is not narcissistic or arrogant, and only authoritarian in a pretty reasonable sense.
Of course is not. The statist legislative regulation of speech in a whole country is a completely different proposal than fairly punishing privately the conduct of one individual that lies or perpetrated calumny. Don't you agree?
Upvoted because I make this argument too, but I think it’s better applied to the kind of person who says “words are just words, man” than free speech absolutists.
Though, to one who believes that swear words have power but shouldn’t be censored: is that just in a legal sense or in a societal sense?
It very much depends on the context. As an advocate of free speech rights I believe the only justification for legally penalising speech is when it is incitement to violence or criminality. Speech being offensive is no good reason to penalise it legally, otherwise it's no freedom at all.
However social groups and independent forums or publishers should be free to set their own editorial standards. Nobody (acting in their private capacity, that is not as a government employee) should have any obligation to repeat, distribute or publish the speech of others that they disagree with.
Yet at the same time, there must be enough independent forums for a true diversity of opinions. If they all end up being owned by a couple of monopolists, any semblance of free speech is just that.
In theory maybe, but in practice we're nowhere even remotely near that. E.g. Twitter is full of very vocal politicians complaining loudly that their political beliefs are being, er, silenced on Twitter. It's all part of the show.
The western media landscape is incredibly diverse, pretty much every conceivable opinion and niche community is available and discoverable. In fact there seems to have been a huge boom in fringe attitudes and beliefs, as barriers to communication have fallen away, exactly the opposite of what you'd expect if communications was being meaningfully restricted and moderated at the societal level.
There's a difference between availability and prominence. What we have right now is a media market (both on and off the Internet) that's dominated by a few large players that represent very few political ideologies. And then, yes, you have "every conceivable opinion" on the Net - but, more often than not, you have to already know that opinion to find more about it, because it ends up shoved off the main platforms into dark corners.
Wait, are we still allowed to say "dum"? Is this even visible?
It's doubly hard to predict what will be censored these days given that so often the censored words lists are themselves secret and, well, censored from view. To combat spammers no doubt.
Few words convey so much meaning, emotion and depth as expletives. Swear words are truly the peak of human language in my opinion.
The absolute best are the ones in every languages that are so versatile. Like "fuck". One of these can replace whole sentences and still be as expressive.
I find that they are like a medicine, that if I use them for every ache pain or sniffle, they don't work as well when I truly need them. When I use an expletive I want people to understand I have exited my normal range of emotional intensity.
"Fucking" is the only English "infix" that I know of, where it can be inserted inside of words like "abso-fucking-lutely". The only other is "freaking", which is a just euphemism for the former.
Edit: American English, I should say. The Brits have "bloody".
The linguistic “process” that allows this is called “expletive infixation” and it, as you might guess from the name, only works with swears.
There’s some neat work on where within the original word you can add them, made all the funnier by hearing people dispassionately dropping strings of f-bombs “to see what works”.
There's a song that goes, "Wouldn't it be loverly sittin' abso-bloomin'-lutely still?" Still just a euphemism, but an example that can be used with children who lack self-control with their language.
Profanity is a part of speech and it has two forms:
Lazy profanity, which also has low value, is the form where the majority of the value of the expression is carried by profane words.
The not-lazy form, which has considerably higher value, is the form where profanity augments the primary value contained in the non profane elements of the expression.
In my view, the not-lazy form is to be respected and preserved. Using the lazy form is most generally a disservice to the speaker, though not always. Context remains king!
I once attended an experiment where soldiers were trialling a new CIS system. An officer asked how it was going. A soldier replied “the fucking thing is fucking fucked, sir”. It was a succinct statement aimed at a senior decision maker and the trial was halted ten minutes later.
I would argue this with: Should the existence of such a font mean, when fonts can be user-configured in a browser, that all subsentence censorship can be opt-in?
The study actually says that the people who could produce most words starting with F, S and A in a limited timespan, also produced most swear words. So CNN buggered a (rather useless) finding for a clickbait headline. Wonderful.
Everybody’s got an opinion on what bad language means, but maybe everybody should maintain their own local variants of this font that censor specifically the words that they don’t want to see.
With a built-in exception for Scunthorpe, but not for the million of other examples why automatic swear word filtering is a bad idea (Shitake, Sussex, classic, peoples' names, ...).
A fun piece of art, but I hope nobody actually uses this font.
This reminds me of a professor who while reviewing a paper of mine, circled a word in red ink and said “not a word”. So I brought in my dictionary and pointed to the word, and said see?
Remember that this started with "This one wouldn’t have been censored if it was spelt correctly :)" There is nothing about the US in there, only about correct vs incorrect spelling.
Do you have any support for your position that that is a poor spelling? There are multiple ways in active use of transliterating Japanese. One of them involves writing shi+i as shii to produce shiitake, which is then left as is. Another one of them involves writing shi+i as shī to produce shītake. As ī involves a marker English does not have, it gets dropped when used in English. Both make sense.
At this point, we should probably acknowledge that "shitake" is a common accepted variant of "shiitake", just like how most of the world uses "Tokyo" even though it should be "Toukyou".
At least there’s a good reason behind Tokyo, since it’s meant to be Tōkyō but the diacritic was dropped because it’s hard to type. What’s their excuse for dropping a perfectly typable i?
Because double "i"s don't mean anything in English orthography, and at best serve as reminders of a sound you've heard somewhere else?
The name for that mushroom is not from a Roman script. It is translated into one in various ways, official and unofficial, devised by arbitrary missionaries. Once it becomes an English word, it's nice if it is respelled in a way that we can easily pronounce, although it's against our nature as Americans not to just leave it obscure and look down on people who aren't in the know.
British people will happily mangle a word to make it an English word, especially if it's French, but they really should be tried for what they do to the word "jaguar." Americans are more insecure, I guess, due to youth.
Isn’t that the same justification for Shitake vs Shiitake?
In Japanese it would be kanji or occasionally hiragana, some transliterations will be imperfect, and so long as the authors intent is clear, to me that’s all that matters
I don't get it, what bad words does the string "people's names" contain.
Is 'les' a perjoritive for lesbians now??? Or is it the near anagram of 'man penis'??? Or is it because it doesn't contain any of the letters in 'shit'???
Back in the day, I was the Exhibits Engineer at the Computer Museum in Boston. We had an exhibit with a robot arm and alphabet blocks; visitors could type in a phrase and it would be spelled out. I maintained the "dirty word" list, which was the list of things that the robot wasn't allowed to spell out.
How is your experience with performance of ligatures in fonts? I recently tried to create a "meta-font" for Google fonts, which contained a glyph for each font displaying the font name in the font's own style. The glyph would be displayed as a ligature if the font name was encountered. This way I could have a list with all font names that would display normally without the meta font available, but with the meta font available, the font names would be displayed in the fonts' own style.
I liked this idea a lot, but unfortunately with roughly 1500 ligartures (one for each font on Google fonts) the meta font became much larger than expected and quite slow when used in the browser. Any experiences how many ligartures are fine performance wise?
It's ironic how you associated the English language font with the U.S. by default while complaining about everything being U.S. oriented. A fine illustration of how we're blind to our own biases yet others appear so obvious.
It makes me think about the worlds of 1985 and Fahrenheit 451 - what does it look like to make it impossible to express something? When you see a dystopia, what are the mechanics moving underneath its surface, supporting what you can see?
> When you see a dystopia, what are the mechanics moving underneath its surface, supporting what you can see?
In the dystopias that were realized in practice mostly autocensorship.
Let's say you have 1 in 1000 chance of going to Gulag and 1 in 20 chance of losing your job if you say something bad about Stalin. Will you risk it? Will you promote a guy that openly talks bad about Stalin? He will get into trouble eventually and your career will suffer in turn. And so on. 1% is enforcement 99% is fear.
Sure - but generally new dystopic situations are unlike previous ones. Things change and art gives us the potential to reflect on how they might change. In 1984 there is the idea that newspeak is trying to eliminate the ability to express thoughts contradictory to the party line. It's interested to think about what that might look like at every level of implementation.
> but generally new dystopic situations are unlike previous ones
Not really. Replace Stalin with Putin and the incentives not to talk about the war in Ukraine are very similar.
> In 1984 there is the idea that newspeak is trying to eliminate the ability to express thoughts contradictory to the party line. It's interested to think about what that might look like at every level of implementation.
That's nothing new. "Troubles" in UK/Ireland. "Special Operation" in Ukraine. Blasphemy in most of religious societies that still cared about these things. N-word. Etc.
Language is a weapon, always was. It's not even restricted to totalitarian regimes, totalitarian regimes just use it more and generally for evil means.
My problem with 1984 and how it's perceived today is that it made a whole mythology around totalitarianism that makes it seem there's healthy "normal" state and inhuman totalitarian state, and they share nothing in common. In practice they use the same tools, the differences are in scope and intentions.
As someone who has an interest in etymology and historical changes in vocabulary, I'm always amused by how fruitless the attempts to avoid negative connotations have been with regards to terms that used to be considered "normal" terms to describe mental disabilities.
All of these words described some forms of mental disability before becoming swear words and being banned from "respected" language use :
Idiot, cretin, retard, moron, dotard, feeble-minded, imbecile, lunatic. Attempts at being as distantiated as possible from describing illnesses have become swear words in themselves. "special" has become an insult depending on context. As did "challenged", "delusional", "deranged", "demented".
Replacing old words that became swear words with new words has never worked. The new words that describe the disabilities become swear words as soon as they become commonplace in the language. You may not be able to write "retard" on a filtered chat, but saying that someone is "fit to win at the special olympics" will work just as well and be left unfiltered. Until "special" too gets banned, and then whatever word replaces it will be the new insult in the eternal cycle.
Yeah, I think they did that so that if the font doesn't render you get the idea. Certain letters followed by *** are render the blackout bar. But if you wrote the "bad word" in the inspector, or the text area provided, it would also get blacked out.
I used to have a friend who would get offended when I referred to my dog as “my little bitch” and it’s not like I spare the profanities during everyday speech or anything.
30 seconds browsing the site at the domain vole.wtf, where the newest piece of content (found clearly promoted on the homepage) is "Penga - the penguin physics game" with slogan "How many penguins can you rescue?", should be enough to inform you that this is a comedy site, not a gender politics manifesto.
And then who gets the privilege of goin' back and keeping all these silly censor lists up to date everywhere when the standard of "acceptable words" changes? And how to handle "regional" curses? All just sounds like more hassle than it's worth to me.
Society in general, and often an authority in particular. For example if you were a radio broadcaster, your employer might warn you about using particular words:
Ligatures [0] are special glyphs which replace a series of letters. For instance, an "fl" is often replaced by a single glyph which looks far better than the individual glyphs.
Scunthorpe Sans has ligatures defined for each nasty series of characters, but instead of replacing them with something more readable it replaces them with a black box.
> How this s** works:
Modern fonts can combine
letters into a single ligature,
usually for things like fi or fl
but you can pick anything
so we’ve done it for swears.
They are abusing Font Ligatures (https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/glossary/ligature), a feature that allows you to substitute one glyph in the place of two or more other glyphs combined if it looks more aesthetically pleasing. Also used for some other script features / rules.
So far this font has failed to censor a single horrifically racist or homophobic slur that I've tried, and these words are much more universally taboo in every culture. It makes me nervous even just to type them in as an experiment and the words are so shocking to me that it's very possible I have never spoken or typed them out. But they are not censored.
It also only blocks one misogynistic slur (the slur that is in Scunthorpe, but not say the slur that looks most like 'slur') that I've tried.
That's quite a skewed definition of "bad" language.
> this font has failed to censor a single horrifically racist or homophobic slur that I've tried, these words are much more universally taboo in every culture
How to say you’re from the US without saying you’re from the US
Really? You see a joke project made for fun and the first thing you do is try every horrifically racist and homophobic slur you can think of? Do you always look for things to be mad about?
I’ve been toying around with the idea of building self-censorship software. These comments are good for demonstrating that there’s a market of people who would eagerly engage in blinding themselves.
Swear words that mean "jerk" are mostly gender-divided. That doesn't make them sexist slurs. Just because you generally wouldn't call a woman an asshole doesn't make the word asshole a misandrist slur.
You're quite right about it failing to block ethnic slurs though.
I'm interested here, because I've noticed that there's a loophole to the gendered nature of "asshole": I wouldn't call a woman that because of what she's done to me, but if she offends my wife, we might agree that she's an asshole. I'm not sure if that's a common usage or not.
There's a general process going on in Western culture where male-associated words are losing their gendered nature and are being used for everyone. For example, many of the male counterparts of the -tress words for women are now acceptable to use to describe women, like actor.
> The problem was named after an incident in 1996 in which AOL's profanity filter prevented residents of the town of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, England, from creating accounts with AOL, because the town's name contains the substring "cunt".[1] In the early 2000s, Google's opt-in SafeSearch filters made the same error, preventing people from searching for local businesses or URLs that included Scunthorpe in their names.[2]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
Also, grawlix:
> Grawlixes (#, $, , @): typographical symbols standing in for profanities, appearing in dialogue balloons in place of actual dialogue.[2]*
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexicon_of_Comicana
* https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/grawlix-symbol...
* https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/10/the-grawlix-how-the...