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In another thread, Grant Barrett said:
FYI, the entire language is up for discussion on this site. You are welcome to spell out all words, ... as long as they're used in discussion of the words themselves and not in an insulting or derogatory way.
In "..." Grant boldly shows the way by spelling out several common profanities.
I am working right now on encoding a collection of data fields into a 16-character code, comprised of four four-character blocks (to be entered on-line by customers). A few days before completion of the spec, I realized that we should probably eliminate profanity from our alpha-numeric codes (Doh!). Since we're trying to squeeze as much information into this code as we can, bits are precious and we want as few restrictions as possible.
I messed around with eliminating "A" from the first character and "I" and "U" from the middle two characters of each four-character block - seems to eliminate most of them, but that left "Dyke" (which, by the way, I missed on the first review because I didn't think of the epithet - I thought of a Dutch boy with a sore thumb).
I settled with removing vowels, leaving "BCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZ" and digits, but I'm not happy with the limitation. May I pose a few questions for this forum?
1) Have I left any profane words possible? I've run them through a free, plaintext word list, and found nothing, but I'm sure you're brain cells are better than mine in this topic. I'm not worried about "license plate" spelling - I just want to avoid plain-english profanity.
2) Are there locations in which I could allow a vowel in a four-character block, yet still avoid profanity? In un-plain English, what's the minimum regular expression which matches all profanity?
3) In the "go do your own work" category, is there a list of profanities that are avoided in other contexts (TV, radio, publications, etc.)? I've been reluctant to google "list of profanities" from my work desktop.
Any and all help his appreciated. "Shut up and go away" is also acceptable.
I think the biggest problem you have is to define "profanity." Clearly you recognize that, because you spend a lot of words above to do that. Really, you can't determine the effectiveness of any technique till the definition is firm, be it a list or a set of rules that determine if a word is "profanity."
Profanity is an elusive topic. Any word, including fictional ones, can assume the status of profanity simply by employing them as such. Consider frak and frell used in various past prime-time television shows. One of my sons once attended a camp with a no-swearing policy, and all the campers started using smurf and its extensions and compounds. The camp administrators were in a quandary.
The only hope of coming up with a filter is to limit your definition of "profanity" very carefully. With a limited definition of "profanity" the effectiveness of such a filter starts to undermine its very purpose.
You're right, Glenn. In this case, our goal isn't to prevent the communication of profanity (impossible - that only leads to proliferation of euphemisms), but to prevent people from claiming that a registration code is cursing at them. Because of that, we aren't worried about a code that says "FCKU" or "GO2L" (and our target demographic doesn't speak L337) but are only concerned with the English spellings of words that people will complain about.
...still "what people will complain about" may be a target so fuzzy that no arrow will stick. For example, until a few weeks ago, I never imagined someone complaining about a talking greeting card that uttered the words "black holes".
I was hoping for a clever solution, but we may be best off with the safe, dull, and uninspired solution - the vowelderization of our codes.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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