This morning, I stumbled Adobe Systems Incorporated’s Permissions and Trademark Guidelines. This is basically Adobe’s way of dictating how it wants people to use and display its trademarks. Many companies have these, but Adobe’s policies regarding Photoshop are more restrictive (and thus, more laughable) then most.

Photoshop “to photoshop” out of your lexicon

They begin the Photoshop section with the phrase “Trademarks are not verbs”. Here, they’re objecting to the ubiquitous use of “to photoshop”, meaning “to use Adobe® Photoshop® software or similar image manipulation software to manipulate an image”. This prohibits phrases like “Dude, that is so photoshopped” or “the printing company photoshopped it for us”. This seems to be a common theme, with paralells to Xerox fighting to stop us from Xeroxing documents, but it’s still a bit crazy.

I think it’s ridiculous that they think they can stop this usage. One of the unifiying features of human language is our lazyness, and our desire to only do the minimum amount of speaking necessary. To think that we’ll gladly surrender “Could you photoshop this real quick?” in favor of “Could you enhance this image using Adobe® Photoshop® software real quick?” is completely insane.

The fact of the matter is that the verbed form is more versatile as well. In English, we can use other particles to change the meanings of an established verb, and “to photoshop” is no exception. One can photoshop something in, photoshop it out, photoshop something away, and so on. However, one cannot “enhance using Adobe® Photoshop® software out the guy in the background”. Instead, we’re asked to “enhance an image using Adobe® Photoshop® software in such a way that the guy in the background is removed from the picture”. Yeah, we’re going to do that, Adobe. Sure thing.

Adobe doesn’t know what they want

The real beauty comes in that the next heading: “Trademarks are not nouns”. Adobe, you’re in blatant violation of your own trademark policies on this very website.

…and Photoshop is one of Adobe’s most valuable trademarks…
…Adobe and Photoshop are either registered trademarks or trademarks…
…Get everything in Photoshop CS3 plus tools for editing 3D and motion-based content and performing image analysis….

In each of the above phrases, “Photoshop” is acting as a noun. So, I don’t think noun-like usage is what Adobe’s really worried about. Let’s look at their explanation:

CORRECT: The image pokes fun at the Senator.
INCORRECT: The photoshop pokes fun at the Senator.

It looks like what they’re really trying to ban is “Photoshop-Related Metonymy“. Metonymy is where a commonly associated element (or part of something) is used to refer to the whole thing. For instance, “The White House was silent on the corruption charges” or “The press is more and more biased every day” are both metonymic expressions, using parts of these establishments to represent the whole.

So, although I suspect they have no problem with noun form use (“Photoshop® is exceptionally good at what it does”), they’re worried about metonymy with manipulated images, like “Photoshops are causing more scandals every day for the embattled prince”. Perhaps they should be clarifying that on their website, lest they be forced to sue themselves.

Other miscellaneous escapes from reality

According to Adobe, “Trademarks may never be used as slang terms”. This is just charming because it’s an attempt to control casual usage. I can understand their not wanting an ad campaign with “Help Photoshoppers Photoshop better”, but trying to regulate casual conversation shows Adobe to be out of touch with not only language usage, but with reality.

Finally, I’m not sure I buy this “Proper Adjectives” thing. To claim that “Adobe Photoshop” is incorrect and meaningless without adding “software” is a bit ridiculous. Whether or not they want to pretend that Photoshop isn’t a noun, it won’t really change how speakers view and use the term. It just makes them seem stodgy and delusional.

Adobe Systems Incorporated v. Continental Drift

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: A speaker (or grammarian) trying to stop language from changing is like a gardener trying to stop continental drift.

Adobe can write this up, and heck, they can even try and enforce parts of it with marketing and high-profile cases. However, I hope they realize the folly of trying to change established words and constructions, especially when the ones suggested are longer and less useful than the originals. No matter what they do, in everyday speech, people will photoshop images, those images will be photoshops, and photoshopping will be an entertaining pastime on the internet.

Know, however, that we’re not doing it to hurt you, Adobe. Our language is a language of love for your software, and the fact that “Photoshop” is so ubiquitous is a sign of our respect for your work. So, dearest Adobe, please stick to manipulating images, and leave the language manipulation to us.

Tagged with Computers and Software, Conventional Linguistics, Corporate Language, Language Censorship, Language Change, Language Usage, Words, Phrases, and Idioms | 5 Comments


I am discussing profanity, slurs and their censorship in this post. As such, this post will necessarily contain profanity and slurs. Although I’ll do my best to keep usage to the minimum and to keep everything academic, if you’re offended by tabooed clumps of letters on screens, you might want to move on to a different post.

On Saturday, I posted about Apple’s guide to blocking “profanity” in the Dictionary application. Well, shortly after I finished the post, I became curious about the blocking itself, and began to wonder what Apple actually considers to be profane, and how effective this filter actually is.

Ask the experts

I assume that, when looking for a good definition of profanity, Apple would check their own dictionary. Here’s how it defines “Profanity”:

profanity |prəˌfønədi| |proʊˌfønədi| noun ( pl. -ties)
• blasphemous or obscene language : an outburst of profanity.
• a swear word; an oath.
• irreligious or irreverent behavior.

ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from late Latin profanitas, from Latin profanus ‘not sacred’ (see profane ).

For the record, I disagree with their IPA pronunciation (/prəfænəɾi/ is how I say it), but everything else sounds reasonable. So, according to Apple, all words that are swears, irreligious, “irreverant”, or obscene should be removed from the dictionary.

The hunt for profanity

Then, I set off to find obscene, irreligious, offensive, and swear-ish words. Gathered both from my own corrupted mind and from other sources (Urbandictionary, George Carlin’s Seven words you can’t say on TV, and more), I assembled these words in a list, and then slowly started plugging them in to Dictionary.app. Surprisingly, only one word that I came up with wasn’t in the dictionary, “Asshat”, not shocking given its relatively recent birth online. Everything else was included and defined quite academically. I also checked a few words that aren’t really obscene, but describe a tabooed act or subject (“fellatio” or “penis”)

Once I’d checked to see what was in the dictionary, I went about enabling the parental controls. This was actually a royal pain, and requires OS X server maintenance software along with some technical knowledge, but eventually, I got it done. (No, I don’t feel any need to post a walkthrough, read my last post).

Finally, I went back through and tried all the words on the list again. The results were fascinating, and words broke down into three categories.

Beware, this post gets rather packed with profanity after this point. It’s still all in academic context, I’m just trying to minimize the “Oh, think of the children” backlash.

Category One: Unchanged

Some of the words were present in the censored dictionary in exactly the same form as in the normal dictionary. There was no change at all to the dictionary entries for these words, and they were just as easily found as before.

To Apple’s credit, all the “innocent yet tabooed” terms (penis, vagina, fellatio, cunnilingus, dildo) were in this category, showing that they seem to have a healthy (in my eyes) idea of the difference between discussing naughty things and using profanity.

Also, Apple struck a good balance with religious terms considered to be swears by some. “Hell” and “Damn” were both uncensored, and their “profane” uses were discussed as well. “Blasphemy”, the most irreligious word I can imagine, remained.

Some of the entries in this category were a bit more surprising. “Bitch” and “Bastard” were fully present, even discussing derogatory meanings. “Boob” referring to the female breast (although not profane, still viewed negatively) was there. “Slut” and “Whore” were both present as well, unedited.

Much to my relief, “cum” was present and unchanged, both in latin and in English, even keeping the reference to it being an alternate spelling of “come”, whose orgasmic meaning is still present in its entry.

Category Two: Redacted Entries

This surprised me a bit, but there were a number of words which were still present in the dictionary, but redacted such that the “profane” uses were missing.

One example of this is the word “Pussy”. Here’s the normal entry:

pussy |ˌpʊsi| noun ( pl. -sies)
1 (also pussycat) informal a cat.
2 vulgar slang a woman’s genitals.
• offensive women in general, considered sexually.
• offensive sexual intercourse with a woman.
• informal a weak, cowardly, or effeminate man.

Here’s the censored, redacted version:

pussy |ˌpʊsi|
noun ( pl. -sies)
1 (also pussycat) informal a cat.

So, not only is the sexual meaning taken out, but the pejorative (insulting) “coward” meaning is removed as well.

There were other examples of redacted entries in the censored version. When you enable parental controls, “Cock” refers only to roosters, “Crap” is a dice game, “tits” are little gray birds, and a “prick” comes only from a needle.

Interestingly, some slurs were redacted to only include their normal meanings, so “fag” and “faggot” are no longer anti-gay slurs, just terms for a bundle of sticks, and a “dyke” isn’t an offensive term for a lesbian, but instead an alternate spelling for a large, water-blocking structure.

Category Three: Disappeared Entries

Some words were evidently too obscene to include at all (or lacked non-profane meanings). These entries were just taken out of the censored dictionary altogether, and a search redirects you to the closest word (“asshole” goes to “ashore”, for instance).

Some of these weren’t surprising. The F-Bomb and its derivatives (“fuck”, “fucker”, “motherfucker”) were all disappeared by the Parental Controls option. Vulgar terms for bodily functions and areas (“shit”, “asshole”, “piss”, “cunt”, “twat”, “bollocks”) all disappeared as well. Highly obscene sexually charged terms (like “poontang” and “cocksucker”) disappeared with the censorship as well.

Finally, perhaps the most tabooed word in American society, “nigger”, is taken out completely, even though the original entry explains the taboo-ness as well as discussing the contemporary self-referential usage by those of the term within the African-American community.

So, what is profane in Cupertino?

I must say, I’m fairly impressed with Apple’s technology and their restraint. Although they did a very good job of censoring patently offensive words (category three) that have little value except as swear words, they also dealt with double meanings (“cock” or “pussy”) very well by redacting entries. Their censorship was neither too zealous nor too lax, and frankly, if they insist on allowing this, they did it well.

However, as I said last time, I still believe that the dictionary shouldn’t be censored. Kids will find the words sooner or later, and it’s better they find out what they mean from an academic source than from a google search.

I’ve brought my dictionary back to normal mode now, and I encourage people to keep theirs there as well. Parents should be attentive to their children’s language development, and explain what swearing is, why those words are a problem, and what’s not approriate to say at Grandma’s house. What you consider to be obscene may be very different than what Apple’s engineers do, so there’s no sense in having them tell you what you can look up.

Oh, and for those who are curious, “Windows” does show up in the Censored version. I guess that proves that it’s not Steve Jobs making the call…

Tagged with Computers and Software, Conventional Linguistics, Language Censorship, Language Usage, Sociolinguistics, Words, Phrases, and Idioms | 2 Comments


This post contains a discussion of profanity and its censorship. As you can imagine, the post must contain profanity to advance the discussion. Sorry if that offends you.

So, a friend of mine on Twitter recently linked me to a post in Apple’s Support manuals entitled “How to prevent profanity from appearing in Dictionary”.

The obscene and filthy people at Oxford American Dictionary

As most OS X users know, Apple includes a wonderful program called “Dictionary.app” with every copy of OS X 10.4. This program lets you access an electronic copy of the Oxford American Dictionary and Thesaurus. There, you can find good definitions, etymologies, and pronunciations. You can even have it give pronunciation in the IPA if you tell it to do so in the application’s Preferences dialog.

The beautiful part of this is that it’s an entire dictionary. It may not be the full, unabridged version, but it’s very good for free software. You can find nearly any word you’d like in there, ranging from phone to phoneme to allophone. However, you can also find all sorts of profanity, defined in academic terms.

Take, for example, the treatment of one of the more vulgar words in the English language, “fuck”:

fuck |fək| vulgar slang verb [ trans. ]
1 have sexual intercourse with (someone). • [ intrans. ] (of two people) have sexual intercourse.
2 ruin or damage (something).
noun an act of sexual intercourse.
• [with adj. ] a sexual partner.
exclamation used alone or as a noun ( the fuck) or a verb in various phrases to express anger, annoyance, contempt, impatience, or surprise, or simply for emphasis.

(There’s much, much more about this fascinating word)

So, although it definitely contains the word and examples of the usage, one could hardly argue that it’s truly wanton and profanely using them.

Why censor the Dictionary?

Yes, the Dictionary app contains uses of profanity. However, these uses are all academic, and used in the context of describing the profanity itself. So, this raises the obvious question of why one would bother censoring the dictionary at all.

Perhaps a parent might be afraid that little Jimmy will learn those horrid, horrid terms. However, in order for little Jimmy to find them, he’d have to seach for them.

Once little Jimmy knows the terms well enough to search for them, chances are, his mind is already “corrupted” and he’s heard or seen the terms elsewhere. No matter how much fundamentalist parents desire to do so, you can’t make him unlearn what a word means, so there’s not a whole lot of point to keeping the largely academic discussion of the words away from him.

However, even if little Jimmy stumbles across a profane word online, perhaps it’s better that he looks it up immediately and gets the relatively tame information from the Dictionary App, rather than asking his third grade teacher what it means.

Either way, Profanity is a fact of life, and no matter how badly some people don’t want to hear it, it exists. Blocking objective, academic analysis of it won’t make the “problem” go away, and really, it’ll only make the word more tantalizing.

So, don’t censor the Dictionary Application. In the age of the Internet, little Jimmy will always be able to find out what a given word means, no matter how hard you try to censor him. Let Jimmy use the dictionary to find out what words mean in an educational sense.

Unless, of course, you’d prefer he just type “fucking” into a Google Image Search and start browsing. I didn’t think so…

Tagged with Computers and Software, Conventional Linguistics, Language Usage, Language, Computers, and the Internet, Sociolinguistics, Words, Phrases, and Idioms | 2 Comments

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