Re ebay – silly, unworkable policy. BPs are bad enough as it is.

Steven Pinker had some really interesting stuff to say on this on Guardian Science Podcast. Click on science extra.

Just catching up with the news on Taming eBay

Whilst on the subject of swearing & etc, where does the word FUCK come from. One explanation I was given was it was a group fo American Paedophiles who campaigned “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” whilst another swore (forgive the pun) that it went back further an means For Under Consent (of the ) King

Anyone know its origin?

P.S. I don’t believe dictionary.com’s “History”:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fuck

eBay T&S, now incorporating thoughtpolice!

Must go look out my uni notes – my director of studies once said to me rather rashly “more English swear words are from French than Anglo-Saxon”. I disagreed. He sent me off to make a list of each, and I think he was rather shocked at the breadth of my vocabulary

“With the greatest of respect” = “You’re a big giant &^%$”
“.. the respectable honourable …” = “You a big giant &^%$”
“with due respect” = “You a big giant &^%$”

I’m not sure that naff was from Ronnie Barker. Cassell’s Dictiuonary of Slang (vital work of reference for board moderators everywhere!) has various meanings dating back to the middle nineteenth century including a few nice polari usages. ;O)

A friend of mine works in an office that has what we call a ‘scunthorpe’ filter. My mails with fruity language are often stopped. So we have turned to archaic swearing to get them through. My particular favourite is ‘swiving’ or ‘swiver’.. as in fornicating or fornicator. ;o)

dw

I’ve still got the homerun of swear words in a post on the PS board

You get the same effect in SciFi TV screened under the watershed. Battlestar Galacticca etc.

Profanity essentially is “frak this” “frag that” etc. There is no need to use the very obvious word it replaces which means your brain reads it as the same thing.

Or there was FireFly where all the swearing was done in creative chinese. e.g. Gao yang jong duh goo yang (“Motherless goats of all motherless goats.”)

Alternatively there is a series like Deadwood where the swearing was so frequent, strong, it became almost poetic. Not a show for the easily offended.

Of course in t

Just wanted to say thanks to Dan and Adrian for their input: it’s nice to see things from the other side of the fence, as it were.

The B3ta fruit example – which was absolutely hilarious to read at the time – reminds me of the swear jar which got introduced in our office. We ended up saying things like “that customer was a complete quid”, which while it might have cut out the actual word, wasn’t really in the spirit of the thing.

Denise Wilton was talking about the early days at B3TA when they tried introducing a profanity filter. What they did was have the filer convert swear words into fruits. So you would see your text appear as

“Stop being a pineapple”
“Raspberry you”
“I banana you not”
“This is a big fat load of apple”

etc etc

Denise talked about the social behaviours and unintended results of this.

One was that as soon as people realised they started searing profusely to find out what different fruits were available.

Two, people started making up their own fruits. So for expample someone would say “You know, I really think vzaar is a satsuma site”, but Satsuma wasn’t a profanity that had been filted. So it just ended up creating new ways of swearing that no one could control at all.

In the end B3TA realised that it wasn’t in line with their users or the character of the site, and dropped it.

The final unintended consequence is that to this day people (well old timers as much as you can be an old timer on the internet) still use fruits to swear occasionally, which apparently entirely flummoxes the newbies.

I think eBay, if they are not careful is going to lose some of the playful aspect that makes people enjoy it more than say, argos.com etc. eBay could do with a big “breathe in and relax” and let people be people. Like Dan, says, watch out for the big stuff, and let the normal social interactions take care of them selves.

there are a whole army of sad buggers about, that use the report button for sport

I have been around ebay boards for some years, no longer, they are now a potential threat to my ebay business

I do not even lurk them now either I have grown up or ebay boards are now too childish

In fact, norf using xxxx, called shielding, has long been prohibited on the UK and US boards.

The problem for me though lies in the assumption that a group of professional moderators are clever or more cunning than millions of members. I used to think it rather charming when ‘codewords’ or ‘euphemisms’ emerged for banned terms. The obvious one, and the most mild, was ‘carp’. (Ironically, crap wasn’t banned!)

To imagine that the inventiveness of posters can or will be broken is absurd. I feel certain this new policy will simply drive for ever more absurd, clever and baroque euphemisms from the boardies. And also not a little resentment from those slapped for rather anodyne usage that doesn’t really hurt anyone.