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Comment by mitxela | Hacker News Reader

Is "breast" a profane word?

I think they are referring to early admin-controlled bl@cklist. Admins could define their own list of forbidden words, so a message could be censored or deleted if it contained that word. So if a chatroom admin wants to avoid sexual talk, they might conjure a list of words including boobs and breasts. Talk about breast cancer would be a false positive side effect.

Funnily, "breast" is already a euphemism. Originally it was "teat". And now the euphemism treadmill is moving towards "chest".

Are you sure about that? "Teat", to me, is a nipple, while "breast" is, well, the whole boob.

Breast used to be (and to some extent still is) gender neutral, think of breast plate armor etc. Similar shifts also happened in other languages where the word for the upper front torso area is euphemistically substituted to mean specifically the female breast anatomy on top of said area.

But this shift already happened in the 18th century, so today's intuition is also different.

Yeah, depending on context, it can still mean the "entire frontal upper torso chestal area" (like a chicken breast for example is not "chicken boobs"). In medical parlance though it generally refers to milk-producing female mammaries. "Teat" mentioned earlier is usually the same thing in non-human animals/veterinary context.

At least for me, it depends on whether the word is plural. "Breasts" are boobs and "the breast" is gender neutral front torso. "Breast" singular with no modifier could be anything depending on what pops into mind first (like "chicken breast").

It’s bizarre to see this happening in real time. When I was a kid, things were always loosening, and the adults were scrambling to keep us contained. Now it’s going in reverse.

I must admit I never really expected this!

Depends. Uncovered human or chicken?

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