Those of us who browse the internet with our young children, and work for employers who do keyword-based traffic monitoring, might beg to differ. But those subtleties, and probably anything that doesn’t directly relate to you, are most likely lost on you.
So what if children see the word fuck? It’s a word. Boo hoo.
So that’s an interesting point. I fall under the category of people who think that words shouldn’t be considered bad. If you don’t like the meaning of the word, you may have other problems, but fundamentally, there should be no difference between the words fuck and sex (when used as a verb). Or cunt, vagina, and pussy. Don’t want your kids knowing about sex organs too early? Then none of the above should be acceptable. But picking out one and saying that it’s bad is really just stupid, and even worse is substituting another slang word like hoohaa.
But all this has a caveat. As humans, we’re social creatures. We live, work, and interact with other people. As a father, despite how I feel about ‘bad’ words, I don’t want my kid to be stigmatized or ostracized. I don’t want his teachers to punish him just because a few tight-asses got together and decided that a certain combination of syllables shouldn’t be spoken. As such, yeah, I don’t want him seeing (or worse, hearing) the words because he may repeat them in the company of people who will think badly of him for it.
The joke of it all is that I realize that I’m perpetuating the system by feeling this way. We’ll never get past this idiocy if we continue to use patterns which reinforce the behavior. But while I might be willing to sacrifice my own reputation for a cause like this, I won’t sacrifice my child’s. And so the cycle continues.
Unfortunately, the lesson at the end of the day seems to be that if you want to be protected from offense, don’t communicate with strangers. And that pretty much takes the fun out of most of the internet.
Having been to Scunthorpe I really don’t mind if obscenity filers prevent me from searching the web for it. Call it natural selection, web style.
Seriously though, it’s an absolute pain when dealing with over-zealous obscenity filters on message boards when you’re using language which may actually have a clean, non-obscene usage.
As for a language’s development isn’t it in the preservation of decency which has actually led us to develop some of these fantastic colloquialisms in order to slip through the censorship net? Perhaps obscenity filters should actually become thesauri, intelligently providing synonyms and etymology of words rather than filtering them out? At least that way our kids actually get to learn how to use the words correctly…
TraumaPony : So what if children see the
TraumaPony : word fuck? It’s a word. Boo hoo.
What if someone were to call your wife a slut and your mother a bitch, would you reply It’s a word. Boo hoo.?
Chris, you miss the point. The sentiment behind the word is what should offend, not the word itself. So I’d be offended in those cases, just as I’d be offended if they called her promiscuous.
I used to be in the trivia chat rooms at yahoo. One of the favorite questions was WHo wrote Great Expectations? Ans: Charles Richardens (that’s how it would appear).
I regularly circumvent obscenity filters in forums by inserting bogus tags in the middle of the word to create false word boundaries. The output is the same, but the filter can’t catch it.
Except I normally do this because obscenities are fun.
I worked for a company that created kiosks allowing customers access to what was formally a database with only internal access. The data entry for new records was done by low wage, part time employees so the corporate office created a task of automatically purging funny records, including those that weren’t directly obscene, but merely sound-a-likes.
There was lots of self-congratulation until the angry phone call from Mr. Phuc Ho.
to sustain a child friendly environment on the internets, Jeff ?
Can I get a filter that reverts any ‘hilarious’ misspelling memes, or ‘hilarious’ made-up-word memes back to their proper English forms?
It could have a blacklist that is updated once a week with the previous week’s memes. I cay say with a high degree of certaincy that I would not lose any comedy by censoring hilarious memes that were positively identified an entire week ago.
IIRC in the new Battlestar Galatic they use the word frak instead of fuck. Like others have pointed out, how is using substitute words that mean the same thing any better then the original offending word. :?
