Is the acceptance of profanity into our language good?

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I guess mods agree with censorship, or else they wouldn't have signed up to mod a community that practices it. Am I right?

mmmm not necessarily. it's possible to agree be a moderator for other reasons and thus agree to enforce the rules even if they are not really rules that the moderator would choose. so a person might agree to be a moderator because they want to help WP to be a place that is supportive and spam-free (for example), yet not personally care about the swearing.

for me, IRL i curse like a sailor and i think that profanity has an important role in communication, but my job here is to enforce the rules... so i do. it's just one rule of several, but i don't get to cherrypick which ones i think are important.

I dislike swearing (even though I do swear sometimes lol) for aesthetic reasons. The same reason I dislike most modern art. I just find profanity to be ugly.

Does anybody have the "keep-up" cards? Why are we talking about the application of public standards to private space?

Inside WP, the rules mean what Alex says they mean.

In public, the First Amendment means what the Supreme Court says it means.

The two are not now, and never have been equivalent propositions.

In principle no, I don't agree with many forms of censorship - but I also don't consider WP's rules on swearing or anything else as any sort of serious hindrance to expressing myself here and so I had no issue with accepting the rules as a member.
How I feel as a moderator about WP's censorship of swearing is irrelevant because it's just one rule of many I've agreed to help enforce.


Bun, I'll answer your question with a question: why would you consider use of the word "would" in relation to a person worthy of questioning?
And here's another one for you: what is the purpose of the swearwords in your current signature? (below)
"'Indie kid' is just another word for outcast, an emotional f**k up, lonely, scared, but madly arrogant Motherf***er. The young Oscar Wilde was an indie kid and so was Jesus, before he turned into f***ing Bono."

Thank you; this is the whole point.
It's his website so therefore his rules.

Are there rules about staying on topic in a thread or keeping threads to a minimum by using the search function? Is that equally enforced?

presumably you have read the rules. if you have a question about what is included in the rules, you should know where to find the answer.

It looks like we can go off topic as much as we want. And, we already have. This was a thread about swearing--not about WrongPlanet rules, and certainly not about WrongPlanet rules that are unrelated to the topic of swearing.

As for keeping threads to a minimum by using the search function: there are a lot of people who complain, and accuse you of necromancing, if you use the search function and resurrect an old thread. However, neither necromancing nor complaining about the same are against the rules.

I agree with both options in the poll.

I think that swearing perhaps needs to be censored or taboo for it to be swearing. I think there is a psychoanalytic perspective that says that it is the breaking of rules that provides the particular flavour we are after in that transgressive act. It is therefore self-defeating to call for swearing to become accepted as this would rob it of its enjoyable function.

I really like the Stephen Fry quote.

Personally, I tend dont swear in public and I would not want a public realm where there was swearing willy-nilly because I find it aggressive and unsettling when I don't know the person. But in private I am happy to swear my head off and I want to be able to swear with people I know as well. In fact, it is perhaps a measure of how well I know someone, how much I can swear with them, for free-swearing indicates the absence of the public realm and the presence of the private or personal one.

Just my £2,000,0000.

I think if the swearing ban was suddenly lifted, you wouldn't hear anything but swear words because the posters here wouldn't be able to handle their new freedom.

and the thrill of puting a little f**k here or a s**t there and there would be lost

Debase language as always been a part of communication, the only way to be totally free of profanity is to develop an profanity free language! Etymological speaking profanity was only restricted to the act of blasphemy.

Social norms and there changes have a key role in profanity being accepted (&/or rejected) into mainstream communication.
re censorship again social norms plus morals are factors in this. Also self censorship has a role, we all make chooses on the language we use on a daily bases.

Is profanity acceptable in works of art? eg. from literature D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Philip Larkin's This Be The Verse.

Better still, Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn.

Alex is the dictator of wrong planet.

The site allow the word f**k but not the actual F word. Any idiot knows that it means the same thing.
Most kids have heard the word before and probably use it.