Twitchers in a flap over 'cock' gagging Bird botherers down at RSPB forums are in a flap over the avian conservation charity's censoring of the word "cock". Furious cock commenter JohnD, of Holmfirth, challenged moderators: "When is it not in order to refer to a male bird as a **** and a femail [sic] as a hen? It's censorship that is just silly," the Evening Standard …
.... censoring big brother
you **** ******* ******* ********* ******* ******* *** ***** **** **** **** ****** ********** ******* ***** ***** ****** ********** **** and ****** ***** ******** ****** ***** ******* ******** because **** ********* ** you ****** ** and then you **** you know
It doesn't seem to occur to these prats that children need to learn that words can mean different things, and that by censoring *all* occurrences of a word like cock they are merely emphasising the vulgar meaning over all the rest.
What next, censoring "bottom" because one of its meanings makes young kids giggle?
Just imagine the trouble a twitcher could have posting a description of a farmyard scene on one of their recent rambles.
...the Turkey was gobbling at a large Cock that had invaded its patch. I was watching a large gathering of Great Tits worrying another large Cock, the Swallows this year are in great abundance.
Read with a slightly adenoidal Brummie accent it all seems clean and decent.
Say this is as bad as using an American Dictionary from Microsoft Word(tm) in the proper English Speaking world of the other 650 million or so language users outside George's new Empire of drug riddled new acquisitions(one new NATO military province alone bordering the Greater New Russia! , alone produces 6,700 metric tonnes and has a fast expanding production! , for this narcotic)
Oh how well we were warned back in the late sixties , about all these wankers and adherents to the "Peter Principle" who would seek to impose all silly and illogical ways in a uniform manner!
So many wankers , but sadly no commonsense will prevail in this new century , of the new age of the dark uniform unenlightenment that is coming!
How silly are we? , to let these fools and idiots lord over us?
A friend of a friend of mine once was typing up the tracklisting of an (Oasis, if my memory serves me correctly) CD in Microsoft Word. One of the tracks was called "f***ing in the bushes" -- but originally with the letters U, C and K in place of my friend's friend's modesty-stars.
What was interesting was Word's list of suggestions for the "mis-spelt" word. These included "face-lifting" and, probably with an ironic ring of truth for some people, "fact-finding" ! As in, "The minister has just returned from a f***ing mission to Thailand."
Interestingly, further experiments showed that Word treated correctly-spelt swear-words as correctly-spelt, but never offered them as suggestions for mis-spelt words -- so it must be keeping track of which words are or are not considered fit for use in polite company.
That gives me an idea for a hack which would be much more phun than simply popping up pr0n sites or redirecting web searches to competitors' sites .....
Yesterday (1st June) an apologist from the RSPB gave BBC Radio 4's PM programme the following explanation:
It's the computer's fault!
Apparently their blog filter replaced cock by ****.
As you rightly point out though, there's plenty of tits and even a few shags (a water bird like a cormorant the RSPB rep hastily said) on the RSPB site.
The upright citizens of South Carolina often stage public shagging contests. The Shag is a popular (non-horizontal) dance there.
A wonderful piece of inverse-prudery from Microsoft - when Intel first launched the the successor to the 486, Word's spell checker used to helpfully correct "Pentium" to "penis".
You tell a tiny part of the story.
Apparently this occured once, and the filter dictionary was edited to remove the word cock as soon as they were informed / had picked it up.
Listening to the member of staff from the RSPB on the radio yesterday, is sounds as though the media has kicked up a huge storm, a lot of it inaccurate, about a one-off incident that was not that significant.
Oh well, nothing changed there, then ...
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