Every cuss word we know

by Matthew Stibbe on January 19, 2008

At last, living up to the title, here is a video about swearing. This definitely not suitable for work or playing in front of your mother.

At last, some bad language on Bad Language.

(And the personal bit: this reminds me of when I was working on LEGO Loco. The game let players send little postcards over the internet by dropping them into a goods wagon on a train. LEGO were anxious to prevent this being used to spread profanity and wanted us to add a profanity filter. We asked them for a list of forbidden words and they gave us a couple of dozen. You know, the obvious ones. I didn’t think this was going to be good enough so I got my programmers to email their favourite rude words. We soon had a list of hundreds of words. I guess the points are 1) any word can be a swear word in the right context and 2) there are lots of them and 3) they are a natural part of language.)

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    { 1 comment… read it below or add one }

    Peter January 19, 2008 at 3:48 pm

    What you need is a Bayesian obscenity filter. It would work in exactly the same way as a Bayesian spam filter, but it would be trained to spot messages containing obscenities, rather than spam. Problem solved.

    Hmm. I think I’ll go and sell this idea to the Chinese. A Bayesian democracy-and-human-rights filter. Waddya’ think?

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