Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font
vole.wtf
vole.wtf
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.
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?
I don’t think the actual words are relevant to the act of swearing.
For kids, I can definitely see it's value in improving their reputation inside kids community by signaling their "grownup abilities".
Much like funny film clips where people bleep innocuous phrases to make them sound sweary. That's the joke, see?
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.
¹ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03880...
I’ve always heard and used that “word” in the sarcastic sense, rather than as meaning more/most fantastic. Using in context to illustrate:
Friend: I broke the part we need to finish the project.
Me: Fanfuckingtastic, guess I’ll get busy making another one.
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.
Here’s just a few, there’s a bunch more:
- back
- best
- better
- bitter
- broadside
- clean
- clear
- close
- cod
- collect
- counter
- crisscross
- damn
- double
- down
- even
- express
- fair
- fast
- fine
- firm
- flush
- forward
- free
- full
- home
- jolly
- last
- light
- low
- o.k.
- okay
- out
- pat
- plain
- plumb
- plump
- pop
- prompt
- quiet
- right
- rough
- round
- second
- short
- solo
- square
- steady
- still
- tiptoe
- true
- upstage
- well
- wholesale
- worst
- wrong
- zigzag
As an added bonus, the words above aren’t just valid as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, they are also adverbs too.
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.
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.
0) http://hackersdictionary.com/html/The-Jargon-Lexicon-framed....
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?
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.
in english, i swear like a pirate while on my native language, i try not to do it.
https://www.connexionfrance.com/Mag/Language/Swearing-in-a-s...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/mar/27/bad-lan...
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.
- 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.
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. :)
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.
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.
Eloquence and good vocabulary are important, but there is a time and place for something vulgar and basic.
Just like there's a time and place for a rapier and there's also a time and place for a folding chair or a pool cue.
Also, there are some truly eloquent swears out there!
Contrast: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ClusterFBomb
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.
I mean you could insert a variation of "fuck" half a dozen times in the above sentence and it would add nothing of value to it.
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.)
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.
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'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 for kicks and giggles. You know you mean shits and giggles, they know you mean shits and giggles, the phrase makes no sense with kicks.
Seems pointdiddlyointless.
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.
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.
Farghin' ice hole.
> 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.
The eventual normalization of swear words will show that we have won the battle.
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 ;-)
Family agreed as of high school that we could all use rude language.
And I have discovered I don't want to anymore.
I am 50+ years old now, and I get far more satisfaction out of calling someone a "poopy-head". When necessary.
Not sure why. Haven't compared notes with other adults. Did not expect this.
(Also I commend your child rearing technique vis-a-vis swearing. Seems a very sensible approach.)
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.
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”.
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.
I suspect avoiding the former helped much more than avoiding the latter?
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.
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.
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.
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.
An acquaintance has taken to using a feature or piece of wardrobe as an insult, e.g. "Baseball cap" or whatever.
There's also a story that I can't remember fully (my girlfriend knows it) where "prairie hat" became an insult.
...I'm saving this one ;)
I take it as no more than just a bit of typeface fun.
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.
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.
What would you tell a five year old about the reason for nearly content-free conversation?
That said, I'm all for not taking the loony puritan angle when it comes to language and kids.
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?
/s
And uttered by Malcolm Tucker. As a Scot, I enjoy a few well placed sweary 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.
"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.
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".
"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.
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.
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.
:) see, I only said one word and you clearly understand my meaning.
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.
> “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.
Because if you don't, then swear words lose their power. And well, sometimes you need them.
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"
It's an art project over and above anything else.
It's clear the rest of it is just joking around.
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.
Surely a better solution is to provide the players with a way to votekick abusive users, and leave it at that?
sure lets votekick someone from club penguin, im sure that wouldnt encourage cyber bullying and make matters worse
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.
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??
That would go over like a lead ballon.
I don't think this is true.
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.
I particularly like that arsenal is censored to a___nal.
Assume "arse" and "anal" are both on the bad and that underscores are treated like irrelevant whitespace.
Arsenal
A___nal
A______
Yeah, if you type "cuntits" it only censors "unt".
> grep fuck /usr/share/dict/words
> grep '^shit$' /usr/share/dict/words
> grep '^dick$' /usr/share/dict/words
dick
> grep '^cunt$' /usr/share/dict/words
> grep '^bitch$' /usr/share/dict/words
bitch
(This comment doesn't reflect well on me. Fortunately, this is a pseudonymous account.)
If anyone thinks less of you because you simply know five swearwords, it's pretty much their problem.
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.]
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.
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.
That's your position. When i'm hiring, there is simply no way i would bring someone on board who didn't know at least ten.
And of course "fuck[ing]" and "shit" are used prolifically.
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!
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.
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
starttheassaultletsfuckthem
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
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.
What are the only 3 English football clubs with swear words in their names?
1. Scunthorpe United, 2. Arsenal, 3. F*ing Man United!
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.
> "Seen" is a typeface that is concerned with privacy and the interception of our communications by the NSA. It automatically strikes through spook words.
I've never really understood why people think that misspelling "fuck" as "f*ck" suddenly makes is socially acceptable.
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.
Hm, HN elides asterisks in in-line text. Maybe they still work in code blocks?
f*ck f***
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.
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?
[1] some of the examples at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem#Other_examp...
I did manage to find one example that was saved by the Web Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20080725103641/http://www.bluegra...
I would've expected Dick to go the way of the Adolf.
Just weird how the same things come round and round.
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
One day we got some feedback saying “what group of virgins wrote this software” because a tester was trying to type in “screw in tyre” as a fault.
First time I’d encountered the Scunthorpe problem in real life, had a good laugh about it.
Any idea how they did this?
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.
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.
Its the font itself doing the censoring, not some script, which IMO removes a good chunk of the 'neatness' of this solution.
But I gather Scunthorpe was the first widely reported example.
Then you need the censorship to be voluntary, so people aren’t tempted to circumvent it.
They use an excellent voice-over actor, Dave DeAndrea to bleep out the errant F-bomb.
Commonly referred to as "transliteration", and the transliteration is spelled "shiitake".
0/10
checked, failed to censor: n-word every word in this comic (nsfw for offensive words) https://pbfcomics.com/comics/the-offenders/
I.e., is there a common use of the word not directed at a person? Like hitting your thumb with a hammer?
> But why should I object to that term, sir? You see, in our century we've learned not to fear words.
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.