The solution, of course, is to use TIPA, which is an excellent system for typesetting IPA symbols (and in fact, the only reliable way I’ve found to ensure that diacritics are placed in the right places). Unfortunately, actually typing in TIPA is a terrible endeavor, as many of the symbols are represented with several characters, or with longer escape sequences (“Columbia” is [k@" l\textturnv mbi@] in TIPA), and although it makes sense at some level, it’s far from intuitive.

So, fed up with manually looking up TIPA symbols, I stumbled upon the magnificently wonderful E-linguistics Toolkit, and from that, have a solution which makes using TIPA tolerable, a simple terminal command which, when run, converts text from unicode IPA into TIPA markup, allowing me to type quickly and still use my IPA in LaTeX.

Here’s how to set it up on your Mac (or linux box), assuming you’ve got a bit of command-line knowledge:

1) Download and install the eltk from their website. You’ll download the zip file, then follow the directions in the readme.

2) Download this file, my tipafy script and unzip it. I’ll assume it’s on your desktop

3) Run these two commands in your terminal:

sudo cp ~/Desktop/tipafy /usr/bin/tipafy
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/tipafy

Then, you’re done! (Sorry, Windows people, I don’t really know how python and creating/running executables works for you :()

Now, let’s say you’ve got a chunk of unicode IPA, like “fownɛˈtɪʃn”, and you need it in TIPA form. Just open a terminal window and type the below:

tipafy fownɛˈtɪʃn

… and it’ll output:

\textipa{fownE" tISn}

Which is ready to be dropped into a LaTeX document.

If you have multiple words, just put the whole thing in quotes:

tipafy "ðə 'sowldʒə˞ də'sajdɪd"

… and it’ll output everything as a TIPA command.

It’s not perfect, but it gets you a heck of a lot closer than just typing blindly, and in my experience, it’s been faster to type unicode and convert than to actually try and remember the TIPA commands for everything. And, of course, the real credit goes to Scott Farrar and the eltk people, who made it possible for this whole thing to work.

\textipa{EndZoj}


To install, download the tgz file (the below code assumes you’ve downloaded it to the desktop), double click it to expand, then open a terminal and type:

cd ~/Desktop/sndpeek-1.3-exe

sudo cp bin/sndpeek /bin/

Once you hit enter after typing the above command, OS X will then ask for your OS X administrator password (to copy the file deep into the filesystem), and once you’ve done that, at any point in the future, you’ll be able to just type “sndpeek” into a terminal and it’ll pop up a window displaying whatever sound source is selected in your Sound input preference pane. I usually give a more complex command to produce a prettier output, “sndpeek –logfactor:0.5 –lissajous:OFF –features:OFF –depth:150′”

I encourage you to play with the software as there are few better tools to help understand what a spectral slice is, how it works, and how spectrograms can be made. Enjoy!

This left me thinking about Peer Review, and what it really accomplishes. In my eyes, peer review (at least in the Linguistic world) accomplishes three things:

1) It weeds out papers which are clearly unfit for publication (due to bad science, missing data, or overall crank-ish-ness.

2) It improves the quality of papers by forcing needed revisions before papers can see the light of day.

3) Most importantly, it’s establishing a web of trust, in this case, between the journal and the reader, that the contents represent good scholarly work.

The third point is, to my mind, most interesting. When I read a paper from the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, I trust that it is reasonably likely to be describing sound (sorry, bad pun) research. I can assume that somebody with some expertise on the matter has read the paper, and that if it had major faults, it wouldn’t have gotten through the black-box review process. I then, as an academic, decide whether each individual journal is worthy of my trust. I may decide that although JASA is worthy of my trust, a trade journal for hearing aid companies may not necessarily be, and in doing so, I develop a web of trust.

Another prominent web of trust

This is somewhat analogous to the way that PGP‘s Web of Trust is structured. Using PGP, let’s say I want to check whether a given cryptographically signed email really comes from John Q. Smith.

Well, if I know John personally and have exchanged (and signed) each other’s PGP keys in person, I can just check to see if the key I have directly from him matches the key which signed the email. If it matches, no problems.

However, you’ve not met everybody you might want to receive ID-confirmed email from. So, the Web of Trust comes into play. Imagine instead that John Smith is a good friend of Jane Doe, who is a good friend of yours. John and Jane, may have exchanged keys at some point, and in the process, Jane would have signed his key (a complex process which doesn’t merit full explanation here), asserting that that key really belongs to John. Jane and I, being friends, would have exchanged and signed keys as well.

When I get the email from “John”, my PGP software will look to see whether I’ve signed and trust John’s key. If not, it’ll see whether anybody I do trust has signed the key as actually belonging to John. In this case, because Jane says that it’s really him, and I trust Jane, I trust the key on the incoming email, and I can say (reasonably) that the email comes from who it says it does.

How do these ideas mix?

Right now, the journal system is oddly equivalent to the above web. I may have never met the author(s) of a given paper, and I have absolutely no idea whether their work merits discussion, examination, or citation. However, because JASA has, in effect, signed the work by publishing it, I choose to trust a given work as being of a better, citation-quality nature than the same paper floating around an author’s personal website. An author who publishes frequently in a journal I trust then earns trust for future publications.

Revocation of trust happens, too (see what happened with the (bogus) Wakefield Vaccine study and The Lancet), but by and large, academic journals serve as the foundation for the academic publishing Web of Trust.

That’s what people don’t want to lose

For many of us, raised in open-source culture and working on projects funded by government grants, it seems bizzarre to consider signing one’s work over to a journal which will make large amounts of money by restricting access to our work, not a dime of which will ever reach us. So, the idea of open-access and the elimination of paywall-based journals is an attractive one.

However, simply cutting these journals out of the loop would, overnight, destroy the web of trust around which we have so far built our academic community. Without a replacement we’re left only able to trust the work we’ve explicitly and carefully reviewed, or which comes from authors whose work we inherently trust.

The democratization of academic publishing isn’t just about open access or reducing journal bureaucracy. Instead, it also has to be based on the opening (and increased transparency) of the review process, a more efficient and open way of choosing which articles are worthy of note, citation, or derision.

A half-baked proposal

Imagine a system in which a paper is submitted to an online archive, and considered by anybody who cares to review it. If a paper is found to be sound by a given reader or reviewer, it can be signed (much like in the PGP sense above) by that person. Then, if I decide to search for a paper, I can find first papers trusted by people I know and trust. Then, if I find none, I can start the more arduous process of fully examining papers which are signed by people I don’t trust, or which aren’t signed at all. Then, if I find a paper reliable enough, I sign it, and so the web expands.

This, unfortunately, has many downsides. It does away with anonymous peer review, allowing tensions and malice to build quite easily between reviewers and authors. This, though, may not be a terrible thing, as the most picky, unpleasant, or theoretically-encumbered reviewers would easily fall to the side.

It also doesn’t allow for revisions as easily as the journal model, and doesn’t provide a mechanism to drop the lowest quality work outright. That said, potential, higher-profile signers could certainly request certain revisions before signing. This, in turn, could very easily lead to inequality among reviewers, with big names able to push for specific changes (to better support their own work, say) before signing.

Also, you would get people who sign for pay, for reciprocation, due to pressure from others, or who just don’t give a damn about the quality of the paper and sign for some other reason. These people, especially if prominent in the field, could very easily pull down the fabric of the system, and allow bad work through for their own theoretical, political or personal reasons. So, this system requires a degree of objectivity and sense of what’s best for the field which many humans may lack.

Finally, it requires more participation and thought about trust than most are willing to put in. You need to ask yourself uncomfortable questions about who you trust, whose papers really are well written, and how much you need to know about a person’s integrity and work before their research is beyond question.

But most of these are actually failings which are already in the existing system, but are masked by the journal process.

I’m not saying this is the way of the future, nor that it’s even a good idea, but I am saying that perhaps the academic community has a lot to learn from the world of cryptography, where trust is examined more closely and pondered more abstractly than it currently is in the world of academic and scientific publication. You’ll just have to trust me about that.

This site will be my space to post about things which, although hopefully still interesting to my readers, are not at all linguistic in nature. That way, people interested in the language blog can look here, people interested in a technology and music blog can look there, and everybody can be happy. Aalthough I’ve moved my review and followup of OS X “Lion” over to the new site, and nothing will change in any significant way over here.

On the other hand, if you are interested in technology, software, computing, music, and whatever else I choose to write about, make sure and check out the Non-Linguistic Mystic!

The first Hammered Dulcimer I ever owned (a Masterworks Russell Cook Edition) was very nice, and it had one characteristic odd note: E320 had an almost low-back-vowel-ey sound to it. Unfortunately, it also had a rattle inside the instrument which couldn’t be repaired, so it went back to their shop for diagnostics, and Russell (very generously) built me a new one, almost identical, save a few small changes.

That second dulcimer, my current dulcimer-love, is a beautiful instrument, but playing around this evening, I realized that that note doesn’t have that same quality (which I do now miss, ever-so-slightly), but I wasn’t sure what that quality was. Many of the rest of the notes sound nicer, so I don’t fault it, but it’s definitely different.

The Phonetics of Musical Instruments

This left me wondering, how do I determine that difference? Then, I remembered I’m a phonetics nerd, I do acoustical analysis of sounds for a living, so I decided to apply the same methodologies to my dulcimer(s).

First, I pulled up two recordings of the same song, one per dulcimer, new-and-old, in Praat. Then, I found the same timepoint of the same hit of that same note from both songs. I made a Fourier spectrum at that point for each of the two dulcimers for comparison (using the procedure described in Section 6.9 of Using Praat for Linguistic Research). This shows the amplitude (power) of all of the frequencies which make up the signal.

Below is the result:

(Also, for those interested, here’s the parts of the songs extracted with the odd note. The note in question is the third prominent note hit. Don’t mind the tempo change, my playing had improved in the two years between allowing me to play the song at faster speeds. Listen to the First Dulcimer and the Second Dulcimer.)

One can very clearly see how different these two notes are in terms of Timbre. The first dulcimer shows an almost vocalic set of strong resonances and weak ones. These resemble the resonances in vowel formants (see this spectrum of the vowel /ɔ/ for comparison), which explains why that note sounds so vowel-like to me. We can see that the second dulcimer shows a much more consistently tall set of harmonic peaks, with a much more consistent spectral tilt.

So, a little bit of phonetic analysis lets us see that although two instruments may be made by the same company, they may be the same instrument model, but they can have two fundamentally different voices.

This phenomenon itself isn’t noteworthy from a linguistic standpoint (“Web 2.0” seems to have been the same sort of trendy buzzword at some point), but it occurred to me today that for many less-tech-saavy users, this “in the cloud” phrasing might actually be affecting how people view these services, and I think that might be why companies have latched onto this term so strongly.

Let’s take, for example, Apple’s coming “iCloud” information hosting service. Apple is increasingly targeting the non-tech-saavy crowd, and this service, like most of their recent developments, is meant to be largely transparent to the end user. Once you’ve signed up, iCloud will take your music, your photos, your documents, your books, your backups, your contacts, calendars and mail, and any additional information you add in through third party programs, and make it instantly available on all of your devices. As they put it on their own website: “Create a document, iCloud stores it, and pushes it to your devices”. Bam. Magic. You turn the service on and suddenly your data is on all of your devices. Who wouldn’t want that?

A rose by any other name…

They’re doing something linguistically fascinating, though: they make no mention of their machines, servers, databases or storage (at least on the user-facing sites). You create, something cloudy happens, it’s on all your machines. They’ve de-emphasized the middle step. Mind you, Apple’s not the only “cloud” provider to do this (Google Docs de-emphasizes the middle step too), but Apple is certainly the most flagrant. But why bother? Why de-emphasize?

Well, I’ve been toying around with a new hobby. Whenever somebody says “in the cloud”, I’ve found it entertaining to replace it with “on somebody else’s computer”. This simple replacement brings me much joy in the absurdity it creates and how oddly different it makes the act sound:

“Our main working copy of the paper is on somebody else’s computer for group editing, but it’s password protected so nobody but us can edit it”

“My data is safe, I store my address book, mail, passwords, documents and photos on somebody else’s computer.”

“Oh, don’t worry, all of our business information is backed up on somebody else’s computer.”

When put like that, we’re emphasizing the storage, the step that Apple and Google and most of the other cloud providers don’t really want you to think about too much. We’re emphasizing the fact that your data is sitting on a hard drive in another state, watched by a sysadmin who you don’t know. We’re emphasizing that when you put something on the cloud, it’s no longer just yours, and whereas naive users might not hesitate to put something into an amorphous cloud, actually transferring their data onto another computer might tickle enough of their sense of privacy to make them hesitate to upload those bank statements or that racy note from a lover.

In addition, we emphasize the fact that the data is there for the cloud provider to use per the TOS. How much do you think that the recording industry would pay to analyze en masse the music library of hundreds of thousands of iGadget users, even if just for market research? How valuable would it be for a website to figure out where to advertise by asking a company storing passwords “in the cloud” which sites are also visited by people who have stored passwords for their site?

Simply put, putting your data “in the cloud” is amorphous. It’s a mystery, but at the end of it, it just works. Putting your data on somebody else’s computer can get the same ends, but it forces you to think about your data in between your machine and your other devices.

Clouds aren’t necessarily bad

This may sound like a paranoid luddite’s rant, but I use the cloud. I currently use MobileMe, Apple’s current iCloud equivalent, for calendar and address book syncing. I use DropBox to keep my grocery list current across all my devices. I have an SFTP provider for storing backups of my data between at-home backups, and in case of emergency. The cloud can provide, in addition to convenience, a type of security against loss. As a friend of mine pointed out on Google+ (a cloud app):

Somebody else’s computer, with extensive redundancy and backup systems, which makes it much less likely to be lost if my house burns down. It is one kind of security. Not the “no one else will look at it” kind, but the “I won’t lose it in a domestic disaster” kind.

This is certainly true, and one of the best arguments for decentralized, cloud-like computing. Data on my computer in my backpack is fleeting. Data on a well-backed-up server in Dropbox’s massive datacenter is much less likely to be dropped, stolen, lit on fire or broken. These services have a use, whether convenience, ease-of-use for non-tech users, decentralization, or simply as an offsite backup of your data.

The techies who have read this far are doubtless thinking “Come on, I knew this already”. Of course data stored in the cloud is stored on somebody else’s computers. Heck, geeks like myself can likely picture server farms, maybe even imagining the mass storage required. They have a good idea of what sorts of things cloud providers can and can’t do across petabytes of data.

It’s not like I’m blowing the whistle on a massive conspiracy here. Anybody who has thought more than 20 minutes about the idea of a cloud knows that information has to go somewhere, and has deduced that presumably, it’s sitting on somebody else’s computer. Apple’s not choosing to skirt the issue so they can “pull a fast one” on the entire internet, they’re doing it because it’s less intimidating to new users. Google Docs is neglecting to mention their servers because they don’t need to. That’s not why you should be using the phrase “on somebody else’s computer”.

We should be talking about uploading your documents onto somebody else’s computer with grandma when she gets her new laptop and decides that that “iCloud” folder is just like her hard drive. We should be discussing storing information on somebody else’s computer for the clueless CFO who wants to upload the company’s records onto DropBox to be able to work on them from his new iPad.

We should be talking about “the cloud” as storing information on somebody else’s computer so that people will think, if only for a second, about whether they care that that picture, document, or file is something they would be OK with storing on somebody else’s computer.

Because TOSes, “privacy policies”, talking around the issue and other calming language aside, that’s what the cloud is. It’s a vast collection of other people’s computers, and in order to decide intelligently whether you want your data there, you need to know where “there” is.

For what it’s worth, Praat (5.2.29) works just fine as well. :)

So, go forth and Lionize your Mac without phonetic phear.

EDIT: But Lion does hide the library folder. In order to install the keyboard layout, you’ll need to unhide the ~/Library folder or to access it using the Finder’s “Go to folder” option.

This tutorial assumes you have MacPorts installed from http://www.macports.org/ and can use the port command.

1. Festival and friends seem to work best on a Mac when compiled from the latest sources, obtained from SVN

1a. To install SVN:
sudo port install subversion

1b. Make a directory in your home folder called “tts”:
mkdir ~/tts

1c. Move into that folder:
cd ~/tts

1d. Checkout the latest versions:
svn checkout http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/festlang/trunk

1e. Copy the “festival”, “speech_tools” and “festvox” folders into the ~/tts folder, using the finder or otherwise.

2. According to , you’ll need to open speech_tools/include/EST_math.h and change:

/* Apple OSX */
#if defined(__APPLE__)
#define isnanf(X) isnan(X)
#define isnan(X) __isnan(X)
#endif

to:

/* Apple OSX */
#if defined(__APPLE__)
#define isnanf(X) isnan(X)
#if (__GNUC__ >= 4)
#define isnan(X) __inline_isnan(X)
#else
#define isnan(X) __isnan(X)
#endif
#endif

3. Now compile speech tools:
cd ~/tts/speech_tools
./configure
make
make test
make install

4. Now compile Festival:
cd ~/tts/festival
./configure
make
make install

5. Now compile festvox
cd ~/tts/festvox
./configure
make

6. Now ready OS X’s audio for this. This next part is stolen (and updated slightly) from :

Fire up Xcode (you do have the Developer Tools installed don’t you?):
File -> Open… /Developer/Examples/CoreAudio/Services/AudioFileTools/AudioFileTools.xcodeproj
Build the project.

Open up a terminal:

sudo mv /Developer/Examples/CoreAudio/Services/AudioFileTools/build/Debug-Tiger/afplay /usr/bin/
sudo chown root:wheel /usr/bin/afplay

If you find yourself missing any of the above files, download a precompiled version of afplay and copy it to /usr/bin/afplay as described above.

7. Open ~/tts/festival/lib/siteinit.scm and add the following:

(Parameter.set 'Audio_Required_Format 'riff)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "afplay $FILE")
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)

If the file doesn’t exist, create it as a plaintext file such that it contains only the above lines.

8. Go to and download:
festlex_CMU.tar.gz
festlex_OALD.tar.gz
festlex_POSLEX.tar.gz

Then drag the folder inside the festival/lib/dicts folder in that file into ~/tts/festival/lib/dict (create it if it doesn’t exist yet)

Also download:

festvox_kallpc16k.tar.gz

Then drag the festival/lib/voices into ~/tts/festival/lib/ on your machine.

9. Open ~/.profile and add the following lines:

export PATH=/Users/stylerw/tts/festival/bin:/Users/stylerw/tts/speech_tools/bin:$PATH
export ESTDIR="/Users/stylerw/tts/speech_tools"
export FESTVOXDIR="/Users/stylerw/tts/festvox"


9. Don’t bother with the “prompt them” script for recording. It’s a gigantic pain. Instead, do any recordings in . Then, for instance, if you’re recording files for a clock, split the recorded prompts into “time0001.wav”, “time0002.wav”, etc. If you want to attempt “prompt them”, you’ll need to install sox (sudo port install sox) then change any calls to na_play with “play” and the na_record line with ” rec wav/$f.wav trim 0 $duration” (Thanks to ).

10. From there, run whatever tutorial you’d like, you should be good to go. Also, sorry, but I can’t really support this method. Please don’t email me or comment looking for additional tech support information about this.

Enjoy! (and sorry for the exceptionally dry post, but this is a useful bit of information to have out there :))

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.

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…