
What a load of...
***** ********!
I think that they should just ** **** and stick this up their *******!
Google's turned on speech recognition for Google Docs users, but only if you're polite. That's the conclusion of blogger Gretchen McCulloch, who writes about swearing at Strong Language (while the blog is probably NSFW, it's got some gems, such as a thorough trawl of Australia's Hansard to record “unparliamentary language” …
Why don't the "Winkers" at the "fracking" chocolate factory takes their prudish ideas and stuff them up their "harshs"...
The "fracking" "counts" need to stop sucking "cooks" for a moment and start to realise that the real world is not as "fracking" pretty as they would like us to believe.
What's next ? Removing Penis, Vagina, Breasts and Clitoris because they too are "rude".....
The PC brigade must be celebrating this amazing "fracking " news...
Microsoft used to (maybe still do) have a team whose job is to figure out what frustrated users typing angrily into help fields actually want. So, for instance, typing "goddamn clippy" would bring up instructions on how to remove the bloody Office Paperclip. That's interesting, my friends and I thought, and we started experimenting. Turned out typing "fuck you" into the help box in MS Word brought up a template for a job resignation letter. Hats off to Microsoft.
Don't think it still does, sadly.
>Go use some other software.
Hey look my general attitude towards Google the last few years. My only android phone (a spare) for example doesn't have a Google account associated with or any Google apps on it. Duckduckgo also is getting better by the week as well. If only Apple Maps wasn't still such garbage. At least you can disable location service for Gmaps when its not running.
I would guess that it is to stop someone suing google for $100billion for distress, offense and personal harm due to saying the word Phucket and it translating to fuck it.
I wonder how much speech recognition should be expected to compensate for the complete mispronunciation of words though?
"Phucket", the place, starts with a 'p' sound. Technically, it's an "aspirated" p sound, which means that it comes with a quick outburst of air. The 'h' is what distinguishes a normal p sound (like in "nap") from an aspirated one in the transliteration to our alphabet. It's never a good idea to assume that normal English orthography rules (like 'ph' -> 'f') apply when dealing with foreign words, especially place names.
"I think it's actually "Fucking", at least that's what I seem to recall it saying on the sign."
That's what it says (surprisingly, all things considered) on Google maps.
Apparently Google maps has no qualms about planning this route.
It even suggests going via Tittmoning.
...in the great state of Pennsylvania...one can start out in Blue Ball...drive for about 15 minutes...enter Intercourse...then end your journey in Smoketown 7 minutes later...feeling very satisfied.
However...to reach the three towns in Pennsylvania named Climax...one must be willing to put several hours into the effort. They are not easy to reach from Intercourse...but when is it ever...at least for her?
Mine's the one with the NSFW map book in the pocket.
When did the English go all prudish?
Chaucer's pilgrims include a nun and a monk, and various respectable people. They are off on a religious pilgrimage. One of his tales, supposedly told by a miller, is about a carpenter who is cuckolded by a student, with some quite graphic detail including the wife getting kissed on the anus by a trainee cleric. The only person in the story who gets no sympathy is the carpenter, who shouldn't have married a wife so much younger than himself.
Everybody is reported as laughing at the story except the carpenter in the group, who later tells a story about a miller being cuckolded by a pair of students.
"So what happens when you try to write about Scunthorpe or the Barnsley town of Penistone, the Berkshire village of Cockpole Green or the village of Hassocks in Sussex?"
Mentioning Scunthorpe reminds me of my first (Windows Mobile) PDA back in, what was it, 2004ish, give or take?
It had a handwriting recognition feature, so I duly tried it - with the word cunt, which it 'recognised' as (IIRC) curt.
My handwriting's a bit crap, and it's also possible it was matching the letters written against an internal dictionary, which perhaps didn't include cunt - so giving it the benefit of the doubt, I tried the individual letters, each two letter sequence (cu, un, nt) and both three letter sequences (cun, and unt). All were recognised. I think I also tried a made up word that wouldn't be in the dictionary, without a problem.
So I tried cunt again. Curt.
I also tried Scunthorpe, which got Scunthorpe.
I wasn't impressed.
(And yes, I'm fully aware that it was a pointless, childish thing to try. But I'm a bloke, not a grown up!)
So if I'm talking about faggots of wood (a bundle of brushwood or similar), or indeed eating the pork offal meatball of the same name then I'm basically ****ed?
It would be interesting to learn how they set the standards as to what constitutes a naughty word and what is acceptable.
For example : List of Acceptable / naughty but debatable words
Arse / Arsehole
Masturbator / Wanker
Vagina / Muff
Dick / Dick ( Dick is a name after all)
Sperm / Jizz( Jizm) and derivatives
Erection / Hardon (Boner) and derivatives
Pearl necklace / Pearl necklace
After we have added some words to the list I can only presume that the list will grow longer as people become accustomed to using alternative words. Fuck might get replaced by Feck ( as the Irish already do), will we then begin adding those words too ?
> it's rejection of faggot implies it's based on American swearing. So I'd be curious to see if wanker and bollocks are allowed.
Some American TV writers have started getting round US broadcasters' word bans by using British swearing. Got quite a shock watching Castle when Detective Esposito called someone a wanker.
@Runcible
"I think you are looking for 'Anus' :)"
I was thinking about "arse", as follow
* He fell on his arse after tripping on the kerb whilst walking backwards - Nothing naughty here..
* The arsehole fell down after tripping on the kerb whilst walking backwards - A lot less polite (debatable)
* The fucking arsehole - Defiantely the rude variant..( Nothing to debate here)
Just for the records, I never go looking for Anus, lol.
I remember filters being appied to an internal group at work some time back.
Overnight some folks became 'fellating member-munchers'.
Others were advised to depart this place and procreate' and the old Hansard quote regarding 'micturating in a non-leeward direction' was popular.
But not being allowed the occasional fuck was a bummer.
Nah, if you're doing it right you can just get Shakespearian and insult away to your hearts content. It's always fun to do and watch the confused look on the targets face as he slowly works out exactly what you've just called him.
"Nah, if you're doing it right you can just get Shakespearian"
Our English mistress (Newnham) was highly amused by a bowdlerised-for-schools copy of Shakespeare that we had to use, because all the modern rude words had been removed, but the really rude stuff was still there because the bowdlerisers hadn't recognised it as such.
I don't tell Google docs anything, never will. Oh I do tell Google to fuck off, but it is under my breath and they never hear me, just like they never see any of my communications (apart from the odd search query tied to my IP address). The Internet works without Google and works a lot better when all Google ad and tracking services are blocked at the router.
They have a damn good search facility and Google maps can be useful. Yet there are very good alternatives. No one *NEEDS* Google. They have just managed to convince the ill-advised and lay person that Google ARE the Internet.
"(apart from the odd search query tied to my IP address)"
Use StartPage https://startpage.com/ it still uses the Google search but your IP address is not revealed. You can then open any link in a new tab if it doesn't contain a Google redirection.
You can also select to see your results through the StartPage proxy - but many pages won't display owing to the NoScript NoJava nature of the proxy.
You may need to adjust the StartPage settings before you use it. It defaults to using POST rather than GET which is good - but also applies family filters and uses various other settings that look like they might weaken the anonymity.
A bug with StartPage is that under some circumstances it will retransmit a search as a GET rather than a POST - thus exposing your request. This is usually seen if you change the settings after you have a search key already set up. Always load a fresh instance before changing settings. It can also happen if there is a hiccup and the browser asks if you want to resend the details.
"Only a dirty mind would read more into that than there really is."
I can't remember who it was (Humphrey Littleton?) but I remember the apocryphal tale of the lady who wrote to the BBC complaining that she had turned on the radio and immediately heard the words "tits like coconuts" whereupon she had instantly turned off. She was told that had she left the radio on she would have heard the rest of the sentence, which was "tits like coconul shells filled with suet."
Yeah, right. We all know those hypocrites enjoy a nice pair of boobies when no-one's watching.
a few - ok, more than a few - years ago, worked on a thing that was SMS-based messaging to a public display board; building owner had people are paying 25p/message premium to get their message displayed. We blocked just about every word we could think of that might cause offence, and then decided enough was enough, we'd filter new things when people objected.
What we did not count on was the people who took it as a challenge to try to sneak their favourite words through the filters ... made a f***ing fortune, compared with the unfiltered one in another building ...
A few years back I did jury service ( hence AC) and we had to postpone hearing the case because the accused's statement couldn't be transmitted to the court from the cop shop. THe software rejected it because it contained swearing. He'd been accused of trying to murder someone!
Could be worse... If they use a master table of Bad Words in multiple languages for that...
In one game I played, the brilliant admins had merged the forum blacklists of several languages, including the dutch bad-word lexicon, with english, with the usual way-to-liberal use of wildcards. The end result was that you couldn't even write common english words like g*reet*ing, or st*reet*, or mas*tering* a skill...
Mind.. it was fun to play spot-the-swearword as a sidegame, especially for the slavic languages. Especially since that list was pretty comprehensive and contained some real archaic and out of use/context words. Verrah Edumacational ;)
I suspect it's not so much that they heard you say a swearword and asterisk it out accordingly , it's more the fear that you said something that they misheard as a swearword.
I think I'd prefer it to put in "f***ing" if I said something else, that to put in a misheard curse. Hopefully I'd spot "f***ing" more readily, although anyone not proofing any speech-to-text is just asking for trouble,
Just in case you've never seen it, the equally American Merriam-Webster dictionary's web site is not at all prudish, and features audio clips demonstrating pronunciation. I couldn't help myself in stealing some of the sound files and attaching them to critical Windows events. It was quite literally some days before the novelty wore off.
http://m-w.com/
-A.