Why am I not even allowed to ask that automatic censorship of words which prevents them being used in completely unoffensive, common, and long-established ways be stopped?
Autocracy gone offensively bad
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But that's the whole point.
As regrettable as it is that some words can be used in ways which are deemed unacceptable, it's a fact of life, and the way to deal with it is by manual intervention which allows the context to be properly judged.
Only a human (or an impractically expensive system) can tell the difference between:
"I have a bird table in my garden, and I enjoy seeing the birds come to it. This morning there was a pair of Great Tits doing impressive acrobatics on a feeder"
and
"There's a bird living next door and I enjoy seeing her in her garden as she has a great pair of tits"
If the site wants to stop people using words in an offensive manner then they should stop people using words in an offensive manner. What they must not do is to stop the words being used at all, because that is an attack on the richness of the English language, it is a dumbing down (because it gives succour to the idea that you don't need to actually think about what you read and write), and for those reasons it is itself far more offensive than any words can be.
As regrettable as it is that some words can be used in ways which are deemed unacceptable, it's a fact of life, and the way to deal with it is by manual intervention which allows the context to be properly judged.
Only a human (or an impractically expensive system) can tell the difference between:
"I have a bird table in my garden, and I enjoy seeing the birds come to it. This morning there was a pair of Great Tits doing impressive acrobatics on a feeder"
and
"There's a bird living next door and I enjoy seeing her in her garden as she has a great pair of tits"
If the site wants to stop people using words in an offensive manner then they should stop people using words in an offensive manner. What they must not do is to stop the words being used at all, because that is an attack on the richness of the English language, it is a dumbing down (because it gives succour to the idea that you don't need to actually think about what you read and write), and for those reasons it is itself far more offensive than any words can be.
It's not.
Which is why it should not be used.
Using it hands a victory to those who want to hijack a word like queer (which is what prompted my original complaint when I was prevented from using the phrase "There's nowt so queer as folk"), and effectively delete all of the meanings except one. It's an attack on the English language.
Which is why it should not be used.
Using it hands a victory to those who want to hijack a word like queer (which is what prompted my original complaint when I was prevented from using the phrase "There's nowt so queer as folk"), and effectively delete all of the meanings except one. It's an attack on the English language.
And now we see that some moderator has removed the reply to my original post because it used IN CONTEXT, the proper term for a female dog.
You'll find that word many times on, for example, the website of the Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, an organisation which has had HMQ as patron for the last 56 years.
You just don't get it, do you.
You'll find that word many times on, for example, the website of the Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, an organisation which has had HMQ as patron for the last 56 years.
You just don't get it, do you.
BAS said:
In my young day, the word "gay" was also a term of abuse - which is why I won't use it. I suppose language evolves. You can now use the "f" word on TV but NEVER the "n" word, even though it's just a Southern states corruption of the word "negro". (Can I still say that?)
But what I object to most is being forced to use swear words because the auto-censor won't accept the correct medical terms for "dick", or "balls". How crazy is that?
It does evolve, and the word "gay" is a good example - its use to mean carefree, happy, or brightly coloured etc has pretty much disappeared (although we still use the adverb "gaily").
And yes - it did also become a term of abuse (but it's not banned here).
I'm not trying to deny, or impede, such evolution, only to say that the site must not ban automatically ban the use of a particular sequence of letters just because in some contexts that sequence is unacceptable. Not only, as I have outlined above, is that damaging, it can also lead to ludicrous situations, such as the one where when AOL started up over here residents of Scunthorpe were unable to register, and people whose name was Dick were told that they were not welcome as customers.
To my mind, particularly given his appreciation of language, it is a matter of undying shame to Stephen Fry that in his Dambusters film he changed the name of Guy Gibson's dog from "Nigger" to "Digger".
You can argue all you like about the triviality of the actual name to the story, but the fact remains that as soon as you start rewriting history because what actually happened in the past makes you feel uncomfortable today you start down a dangerous and pernicious road.
Well actually it allows "penis" but not "testicles", which is even crazier.
But "dick" is not a swear word, per se, nor is "balls".
The site allows me to write "vagina", but not "pussy" or "fanny", i.e. the opposite of the situation you postulated. And although it has fallen in popularity, "Fanny" is a genuine name, and were I a woman wanting to use this site I'd be very hurt and angry to be told that I could not use my name.
Perhaps we should all hope that Stephen Fry never gets asked to do a TV adaptation of Mansfield Park....
All of these problems show that the root cause of them is automatic censoring - it is damaging, dangerous and potentially hurtful, and it should not be used.
I don't believe you are.
I don't know if it still happens, but I have seen hotwater censored to become ho****er! This is obviously a case where two words are better than one!
BAS said:
You're right! I looked back at some old posts and found that the word "penis", although originally replaced with "*****", had been reinstated.
Good point. Time for an experiment. Let's try "pussy cat" and pussy cat.
Well that worked well didn't it! So how about "pussy" cat? Still no luck. So how come BAS can write:
-- but I can't?
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Ah, this just goes to prove the rumors that BAS has mod privileges and his membership is outside the filter.
It is quite common for phpbb sites to have a simple word filter, the admin enter a list of unwanted words and the string that should replace them. It is not clever software that can differentiate between the context of the sentence that these words are placed into, it just sees the word and substitutes it.
If your talking about birds then blue t1ts becomes blue tits just the same as if I had said she's got big tits. (I changed the first word to bypass the filter).
Changing the forum code to be able to detect the context of a word is a mammoth task and one unlikely to ever happen.
BAS, just figure out what words you cannot use and use something else instead. (like you have already done).
Although a list of what words are banned would be good (so we know what to change lol).
It is quite common for phpbb sites to have a simple word filter, the admin enter a list of unwanted words and the string that should replace them. It is not clever software that can differentiate between the context of the sentence that these words are placed into, it just sees the word and substitutes it.
If your talking about birds then blue t1ts becomes blue tits just the same as if I had said she's got big tits. (I changed the first word to bypass the filter).
Changing the forum code to be able to detect the context of a word is a mammoth task and one unlikely to ever happen.
BAS, just figure out what words you cannot use and use something else instead. (like you have already done).
Although a list of what words are banned would be good (so we know what to change lol).