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Scunthorpe Sans, A font that censors bad language automatically
- croes 4y agoThe N word is possible
- wonderbore 4y ago“N word” isn’t a swear word. N◼◼◼◼◼ is
- InCityDreams 4y agoIs it swearing, though, or just occasionaly very offensive?
- croes 4y agoIn the demo box it's possible to type N◼◼◼◼◼ without censoring
- lostlogin 4y ago
- AHappyCamper 4y agoThey didn't block the N word
- L3viathan 4y agoWith a built-in exception for Scunthorpe, but not for the million of other examples why automatic swear word filtering is a bad idea (Shitake, Sussex, classic, peoples' names, ...). A fun piece of art, but I hope nobody actually uses this font.
- neya 4y agoI may actually use it just to p** off people. Oh wait, maybe I didn't need a font for that :)))
- Majestic121 4y agoDid you mean piss off, or is it a three letter word that is missing from my vocabulary ?
- The_suffocated 4y agoYes, it's a fun piece of art. I don't think this was meant to be practical. It was probably just an interesting experiment or proof of concept.
- cynix 4y ago> Shitake This one wouldn’t have been censored if it was spelt correctly :)
- bencollier49 4y agoWhat, in Kanji?
- cynix 4y agoNo, shiitake. It was missing an i.
- hvdijk 4y agoNo, it wasn't. Merriam Webster includes shitake as a less common but valid spelling. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shitake https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shitake
- bluejekyll 4y agoThis reminds me of a professor who while reviewing a paper of mine, circled a word in red ink and said “not a word”. So I brought in my dictionary and pointed to the word, and said see? They then told me that Merriam-Webster is shit, and I should be using the American Heritage dictionary: https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=shitake+&submit.x=0&submit.y=0 https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=shitake+&sub...
- benj111 4y agoI don't get it, what bad words does the string "people's names" contain. Is 'les' a perjoritive for lesbians now??? Or is it the near anagram of 'man penis'??? Or is it because it doesn't contain any of the letters in 'shit'???
- simonh 4y agoSome personal names contain naughty words.
- traverseda 4y agoThey mean names that include swear words in them. For example there are people with the last name Shite (mostly in the DR Congo) according to google.
- benj111 4y agoYes. I was joking. I would have hoped that my increasingly silly theories would have made that clear.
- pessimizer 4y agoIt passed my buttbuttinate test, but it turns out it doesn't think "ass" or even "ass hole" are swears.
- theelous3 4y agoHow about we just stop censoring words in the first place.
- waterpowder 4y agoFuck yes
- sph 4y agoFew words convey so much meaning, emotion and depth as expletives. Swear words are truly the peak of human language in my opinion. The absolute best are the ones in every languages that are so versatile. Like "fuck". One of these can replace whole sentences and still be as expressive.
- galangalalgol 4y agoI find that they are like a medicine, that if I use them for every ache pain or sniffle, they don't work as well when I truly need them. When I use an expletive I want people to understand I have exited my normal range of emotional intensity.
- z3c0 4y ago"Fucking" is the only English "infix" that I know of, where it can be inserted inside of words like "abso-fucking-lutely". The only other is "freaking", which is a just euphemism for the former. Edit: American English, I should say. The Brits have "bloody".
- InCityDreams 4y agoIME 'fucking' is used very often in words, considerably more than 'bloody' - in British Fucking English.
- mattkrause 4y agoThe linguistic “process” that allows this is called “expletive infixation” and it, as you might guess from the name, only works with swears. There’s some neat work on where within the original word you can add them, made all the funnier by hearing people dispassionately dropping strings of f-bombs “to see what works”. Here’s a classic paper on it: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1062&context=linguist_faculty_pubs https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throw0101a 4y agoEtymology: > The problem was named after an incident in 1996 in which AOL's profanity filter prevented residents of the town of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, England, from creating accounts with AOL, because the town's name contains the substring "cunt".[1] In the early 2000s, Google's opt-in SafeSearch filters made the same error, preventing people from searching for local businesses or URLs that included Scunthorpe in their names.[2] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem Also, grawlix: > Grawlixes (#, $, , @): typographical symbols standing in for profanities, appearing in dialogue balloons in place of actual dialogue.[2]* * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexicon_of_Comicana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexicon_of_Comicana * https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/grawlix-symbols-swearing-comic-strips https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/grawlix-symbol... * https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/10/the-grawlix-how-the-katzenjammer-kids-comic-strip-pioneered-the-use-of-typographical-symbols-for-swearing.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/10/the-grawlix-how-the...
- walrus01 4y agoThe residents of Dildo, Newfoundland have embraced the name, you can buy t-shirts that say Dildo and visit the historic Dildo museum https://www.newfoundlandlabrador.com/plan-and-book/attractions/35471445 https://www.newfoundlandlabrador.com/plan-and-book/attractio...
- Someone 4y agoOn the other hand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria): “Fugging (German: [ˈfʊkɪŋ] (listen)), named Fucking until 2021, is an Austrian village in the municipality of Tarsdorf, located in the Innviertel region of western Upper Austria. The village is 33 km (21 mi) north of Salzburg and 4 km (2.5 mi) east of the Inn river, which forms part of the German border. Despite having a population of only 106 in 2020, the village has drawn attention in the English-speaking world for its former name, which was spelled the same as an inflected form of the vulgar English-language word "fuck". Its road signs were a popular visitor attraction and were often stolen by souvenir-hunting vandals until 2005 when they were modified to be theft-resistant. The name change to Fugging, which is pronounced the same in the local dialect, was rejected in 2004 but passed in late 2020.”
- 0xedb 4y agowh*e made it through. What is bad language? Who decides?
- npteljes 4y agoSociety in general, and often an authority in particular. For example if you were a radio broadcaster, your employer might warn you about using particular words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words
- blooalien 4y agoGeorge Carlin was a comedy super-hero.
- blooalien 4y ago> "What is bad language? Who decides?" And then who gets the privilege of goin' back and keeping all these silly censor lists up to date everywhere when the standard of "acceptable words" changes? And how to handle "regional" curses? All just sounds like more hassle than it's worth to me.
- zamalek 4y agoI get the idea that this font is a joke.
- tweetle_beetle 4y ago30 seconds browsing the site at the domain vole.wtf, where the newest piece of content (found clearly promoted on the homepage) is "Penga - the penguin physics game" with slogan "How many penguins can you rescue?", should be enough to inform you that this is a comedy site, not a gender politics manifesto. If you want to decide, then fork it.
- Semaphor 4y ago2 years ago, almost 300 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23131559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23131559
- spicybright 4y agoBitch doesn't work. Was the first one I tried lol
- sph 4y agoYou might be referring to a female canine.
- UncleEntity 4y agoI used to have a friend who would get offended when I referred to my dog as “my little bitch” and it’s not like I spare the profanities during everyday speech or anything.
- stevefan1999 4y agobecause bitch could mean female dog
- CoastalCoder 4y ago> Bitch doesn't work. At first I interpreted that entire sentence as slang for, "The font doesn't work." I guess that's another limitation of that approach: multiple parsings of the same sentence.
- blooalien 4y agohttps://www.cnn.com/2021/01/26/health/swearing-benefits-wellness/ https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/26/health/swearing-benefits-well... Why swearing is a sign of intelligence, helps manage pain and more Although, I must admit, it's a creative (mis)use of ligatures.
- omoikane 4y agoIf you like creative uses of ligatures, you might also like: "Video Game in a Font": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26495059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26495059
- tgv 4y agoThe study actually says that the people who could produce most words starting with F, S and A in a limited timespan, also produced most swear words. So CNN buggered a (rather useless) finding for a clickbait headline. Wonderful.
- shric 4y agoIt censors puss for some reason. What a sourpuss.
- galangalalgol 4y agoand I won't be able to write a letter to my friend Dick about his ass breeding, or the tennis balls he left at my house.
- colmmacc 4y agoSo far this font has failed to censor a single horrifically racist or homophobic slur that I've tried, and these words are much more universally taboo in every culture. It makes me nervous even just to type them in as an experiment and the words are so shocking to me that it's very possible I have never spoken or typed them out. But they are not censored. It also only blocks one misogynistic slur (the slur that is in Scunthorpe, but not say the slur that looks most like 'slur') that I've tried. That's quite a skewed definition of "bad" language.
- void-pointer 4y agoPerhaps because it’s a joke font that’s not supposed to be taken seriously?
- pwdisswordfish9 4y ago> this font has failed to censor a single horrifically racist or homophobic slur that I've tried, these words are much more universally taboo in every culture How to say you’re from the US without saying you’re from the US
- causality0 4y agoSwear words that mean "jerk" are mostly gender-divided. That doesn't make them sexist slurs. Just because you generally wouldn't call a woman an asshole doesn't make the word asshole a misandrist slur. You're quite right about it failing to block ethnic slurs though.
- JasonFruit 4y agoI'm interested here, because I've noticed that there's a loophole to the gendered nature of "asshole": I wouldn't call a woman that because of what she's done to me, but if she offends my wife, we might agree that she's an asshole. I'm not sure if that's a common usage or not.
- causality0 4y agoThere's a general process going on in Western culture where male-associated words are losing their gendered nature and are being used for everyone. For example, many of the male counterparts of the -tress words for women are now acceptable to use to describe women, like actor.
- hahamrfunnyguy 4y agoCan anyone summarize how this works?
- KhalPanda 4y agoRight on the home page... > How this s** works: Modern fonts can combine letters into a single ligature, usually for things like fi or fl but you can pick anything so we’ve done it for swears.
- breakingcups 4y agoThey are abusing Font Ligatures (https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/glossary/ligature https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/glossary/ligature), a feature that allows you to substitute one glyph in the place of two or more other glyphs combined if it looks more aesthetically pleasing. Also used for some other script features / rules.
- onion2k 4y agohttps://fonts.google.com/knowledge/glossary/ligature https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/glossary/ligature
- dtgriscom 4y agoLigatures [0] are special glyphs which replace a series of letters. For instance, an "fl" is often replaced by a single glyph which looks far better than the individual glyphs. Scunthorpe Sans has ligatures defined for each nasty series of characters, but instead of replacing them with something more readable it replaces them with a black box. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dtgriscom 4y agoBack in the day, I was the Exhibits Engineer at the Computer Museum in Boston. We had an exhibit with a robot arm and alphabet blocks; visitors could type in a phrase and it would be spelled out. I maintained the "dirty word" list, which was the list of things that the robot wasn't allowed to spell out.
- biztos 4y agoDid it autocorrect, like Apple’s famous ducking duck?
- jl6 4y agoEverybody’s got an opinion on what bad language means, but maybe everybody should maintain their own local variants of this font that censor specifically the words that they don’t want to see.
- shever73 4y agoPity that the small town in Austria changed its name to Fugging.
- mike_hock 4y agoThose fuggin' fuggers!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- JasonFruit 4y agoThis is totally broken. It still lets me say "damn". I'm calling the police.
- mikey_p 4y agoSounds like this is a good solution to a clbuttic problem. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Clbuttic-Mistake- https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Clbuttic-Mistake-
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bj-rn 4y agoReminds me of Paranoia Sans "a self-censoring, conspiratorial typeface that will automatically redact more than 150 words popular in conspiracy myths/theories." https://fleg.de/paranoia https://fleg.de/paranoia
- Semiapies 4y agoThat's delightful. Thanks for showing a sense of humor, unlike most of the people commenting.
- pavel_lishin 4y agoIt would be fun to be able to generate these fonts for any arbitrary phrases people might use!
- gs17 4y agoWeird that it turns "alien" into "aTRUTHn", but "aliens" gets blanked.
- Hanschri 4y agoMy only guess would be that it for some reason picks up on 'lie' within the word while you're typing it out, changing in to 'TRUTH', and then blanks when it detects 'aliens'.
- ovsuvdjv 4y agoAt a guess, the dictionary contains "aliens" and "lie", but not "alien", and rewriting proceeds in alphabetical order.
- geuis 4y agoSo I don't know if this really works or not, but if you copy and paste the purported blacked out words, it's just using asterisks ie shit is s**.
- projektfu 4y agoYeah, I think they did that so that if the font doesn't render you get the idea. Certain letters followed by *** are render the blackout bar. But if you wrote the "bad word" in the inspector, or the text area provided, it would also get blacked out.
- chmod775 4y agoThis doesn't censor anything at all, because it's still perfectly clear what is being said. Makes as much sense as replacing 'dickhead' with 'penishead'.
- ddingus 4y agoA broken font that does not accurately represent expression. Seems pretty useless to me. Edit: Joke or Art font. Got it!
- kwatsonafter 4y ago
- aidenn0 4y agoI remember when I stumbled across a forum and was very confused by the near universal use of the phrase "gently caress"...
- viginti_tres 4y agoTry to type fuckuck
- noneeeed 4y agoThat's delightful. I love this sort of silly (miss-)use of technology.
- awsrocks 4y agoCan we have something like this but for podcasts? I want to listen to JRE in the car but I can’t because he swears too much for my kids.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- WesolyKubeczek 4y agoDoesn't censor "classic", "mass", and anything with "ass".
- lostlogin 4y agoIs ‘ads’ considered something that should be censored by anyone? I come from a land where ‘arse’ is probably more common, so may be missing something.
- gunfighthacksaw 4y agoMy cockerel was not amused. Nor was my pussy-cat.
- layer8 4y agoWon’t help for text-to-speech and screenreaders. ;)
- hollerith 4y agoDoes not work when I "try it out here" on Mobile Safari with the content blocker Wipr installed.
- annoyingnoob 4y agoCharles Dickinson
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoAs usual - everything is US-oriented. French still have to suffer looking at merde and putain and politique.
- OisinMoran 4y agoScunthorpe is in England.
- educaysean 4y agoIt's ironic how you associated the English language font with the U.S. by default while complaining about everything being U.S. oriented. A fine illustration of how we're blind to our own biases yet others appear so obvious.
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoOhhhh, that was a joke (as highlighted by the last dirty word). I am sorry for having offended anyone by mentioning the US.
- momirlan 4y agoEnglish only :-)
- wizofaus 4y agoDoesn't work on Strine, try "Bloody hell, quit arsing about, ya total drongo".
- MrYellowP 4y agoBad language doesn't exist. It simply fucking doesn't. That's just the person, who has a problem with words, blaming the words for his problem. The problem is solely within those who don't want to hear it, who believe they can tell others how to speak.
- millzlane 4y agoThe problem comes in when the crybabies cry because noone wants to play with them.
- sbcd 4y agoAs someone who has an interest in etymology and historical changes in vocabulary, I'm always amused by how fruitless the attempts to avoid negative connotations have been with regards to terms that used to be considered "normal" terms to describe mental disabilities. All of these words described some forms of mental disability before becoming swear words and being banned from "respected" language use : Idiot, cretin, retard, moron, dotard, feeble-minded, imbecile, lunatic. Attempts at being as distantiated as possible from describing illnesses have become swear words in themselves. "special" has become an insult depending on context. As did "challenged", "delusional", "deranged", "demented". Replacing old words that became swear words with new words has never worked. The new words that describe the disabilities become swear words as soon as they become commonplace in the language. You may not be able to write "retard" on a filtered chat, but saying that someone is "fit to win at the special olympics" will work just as well and be left unfiltered. Until "special" too gets banned, and then whatever word replaces it will be the new insult in the eternal cycle.
- MrYellowP 4y agoI've added this to the list of things that lead us all into totalitarianism long ago. Thanks for the nice, confirming write-up!
- crikeyjoe 4y agoFuck that shit
- Nextgrid 4y agoRelated: Sans Bullshit Sans (https://www.sansbullshitsans.com https://www.sansbullshitsans.com)
- cabirum 4y agoFor those interested, to get the ligatures in this font, run: otfinfo -g scunthorpe-sans.otf | grep _ | sed s/_//g | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | uniq
- jasomill 4y agoAnd here are the actual substitution[1] rules: https://jasomill.at/scunthorpe-sans_dlig.fea https://jasomill.at/scunthorpe-sans_dlig.fea Source: Window → Panel → Features in FontLab. Alternatively, fontforge -lang=ff -c 'Open($1) ; GenerateFeatureFile($2)' scunthorpe-sans.otf scunthorpe-sans.fea [1] http://adobe-type-tools.github.io/afdko/OpenTypeFeatureFileSpecification.html#5d-gsub-lookuptype-4-ligature-substitution http://adobe-type-tools.github.io/afdko/OpenTypeFeatureFileS...
- aeturnum 4y agoThis is a neat project! It makes me think about the worlds of 1985 and Fahrenheit 451 - what does it look like to make it impossible to express something? When you see a dystopia, what are the mechanics moving underneath its surface, supporting what you can see?
- ajuc 4y ago> When you see a dystopia, what are the mechanics moving underneath its surface, supporting what you can see? In the dystopias that were realized in practice mostly autocensorship. Let's say you have 1 in 1000 chance of going to Gulag and 1 in 20 chance of losing your job if you say something bad about Stalin. Will you risk it? Will you promote a guy that openly talks bad about Stalin? He will get into trouble eventually and your career will suffer in turn. And so on. 1% is enforcement 99% is fear.
- aeturnum 4y agoSure - but generally new dystopic situations are unlike previous ones. Things change and art gives us the potential to reflect on how they might change. In 1984 there is the idea that newspeak is trying to eliminate the ability to express thoughts contradictory to the party line. It's interested to think about what that might look like at every level of implementation.
- ajuc 4y ago> but generally new dystopic situations are unlike previous ones Not really. Replace Stalin with Putin and the incentives not to talk about the war in Ukraine are very similar. > In 1984 there is the idea that newspeak is trying to eliminate the ability to express thoughts contradictory to the party line. It's interested to think about what that might look like at every level of implementation. That's nothing new. "Troubles" in UK/Ireland. "Special Operation" in Ukraine. Blasphemy in most of religious societies that still cared about these things. N-word. Etc. Language is a weapon, always was. It's not even restricted to totalitarian regimes, totalitarian regimes just use it more and generally for evil means. My problem with 1984 and how it's perceived today is that it made a whole mythology around totalitarianism that makes it seem there's healthy "normal" state and inhuman totalitarian state, and they share nothing in common. In practice they use the same tools, the differences are in scope and intentions.
- fortyseven 4y agoMore useful: make it change 'cloud' to 'butt' automatically, like that browser extension.
- jansan 4y agoHow is your experience with performance of ligatures in fonts? I recently tried to create a "meta-font" for Google fonts, which contained a glyph for each font displaying the font name in the font's own style. The glyph would be displayed as a ligature if the font name was encountered. This way I could have a list with all font names that would display normally without the meta font available, but with the meta font available, the font names would be displayed in the fonts' own style. I liked this idea a lot, but unfortunately with roughly 1500 ligartures (one for each font on Google fonts) the meta font became much larger than expected and quite slow when used in the browser. Any experiences how many ligartures are fine performance wise?
- pwr22 4y agoSome engines are profane.... apparently :P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wankel_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wankel_engine
- MollyRealized 4y agoFuck yeah.
- AnonHP 4y agoIt seems like a simplistic find and replace. It censored “pussyfoot”, which is not bad language.