Periodically, one goes through periods of deep metaphysical malaise. You look around at the world, wondering how such evil could flourish and such suffering could endure. You descend deeper into darkness, your faith in humanity waning, wondering why we were ever born into this cruel world. Then, suddenly, you realize that somebody has written a programming language based off of the dialect of Lolcats/Cat Macros, and your faith in humanity’s inherent good is completely restored.

LOLCode is a computer programming language concept which draws its vocabulary from the recent internet sensation of captioned cat pictures. Although not fully functional yet, it’s still linguistically fascinating on many different levels, and deserves mention.

i has dialect

One of the most interesting parts of this programming language is that it can exist at all, and the fact that it can goes a long way towards establishing the legitimacy of a feline dialect.

Imagine that I wanted to create a programming language based solely off of star wars vocabulary. I would likely start by finding a donor language, whose basic syntax and ideas I would borrow. Then, I would begin to slowly find equivalents and their translations.

Some equivalent/translation pairs might be obvious. ‘Death Star’ for a verb which meant “remove file”, maybe ‘carbonite’ for “pause process”. One could even get a bit more ornate and incorporate some movie quotes. Perhaps “there is an error” could be coded with ‘It’s a Trap!’, and “load this program” could be ‘Commence Primary Ignition’.

However, no matter how nerdy I felt at the time, my plan would be fatally flawed from the outset. Sooner or later, I would find an expression that was too niché (fulfilling just a small purpose) to have a Star Wars equivalent. I’d have to rely on a set canon of phrases to fill in the blanks, and there’s no way to work around it and still maintain the Star Wars theme.

The reason that LOLCode is so awesome is that, based on what I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t seem to have that limit. Based on my highly scientific research at icanhascheezburger.com, it would appear that LOLCat has become a full fledged dialect. There are many captioned images there, each slightly different, and each seems to fit a coherent grammatical pattern. Some linguists are starting to pick up on distinct patterns and grammatical rules, and based on the fact that any sentence can now be LOLCatted, I’m quite tempted to say that LOLCat has become a productive and functional dialect of English.

Because of this productivity of the LOLCat dialect, it would be quite possible for somebody to take any given sentence or idea and put into LOLCat, thus ensuring that LOLCode could, in theory, become fully functional without ever breaking character. This is very exciting, and very awesome.

mai translationz r not straitforwerd

LOLCode is a very special sort of translation. Conventionally, when one sits down to label a cat, the source is an English sentence (I’m yet to find any cats “en mi refrigeradora, comiendo mis comidaz”). However, here, what people are doing is finding equivalents in human/feline language for concepts, verbs, and ideas within a computer language.

Rather than being able to simply translate, they’re forced to create the inflexible, ambiguity free grammar required to tell a computer what to do. This is tough enough to do even using all sorts of abstract symbols, but to do it within LOLCat dialect and syntax is wonderfully difficult. They’re adapting a human language into a dialect, then bending it into a computer language. This is by no means an easy ask, and it’s a far more complex sort of translation than many.

For this alone, I salute the creator and contributors to LOLCode. Although it may seem silly to some, this is really some top-of-the-line linguistic work.

d00d. ur dialect is teh suxx0rs

Perhaps the even interesting than the mere fact that LOLCat has become a translatable dialect is the fact that, well, there are already people who are arguing about the “correct” way to say something in LOLCat. Take, for instance, this post on the LOLCode wiki:

I know VISIBLE is the current output command, but it’s so not LOLCAT. What if we used LOL as the output instead? So, the Count-1 example becomes:

(Code)

I think this works very well, is funny to read and matches actual LOLCAT protocol, sorta. I guess the LOL would be at the end normally.

As a linguist, this is really, really exciting. People are already trying to step in and enforce the “rules” of the LOLCat dialect. It seems like, as a “native speaker” of LOLCat, the author of this page had a distinct intuition about the “proper” means of expressing a concept in this dialect. Truly incredible.

Although this community of people has only arisen recently, I’m very excited at the potential for the later discussions of “proper” LOLCat, and the sociolinguistic goodness sure to arise from it.

o hai. i discussed ur werk.

So, author of (and contributors to) LOLCode: I salute you. This is a unique, wonderful, and groundbreaking project, and I really hope that it continues to yield such fascinating linguistic insight into the future.

Keep up the good work, and don’t let anybody convince you that what you’re building is silly or unnecessary. If there are two things that the world of technology needs, it’s probably humor and cute, fuzzy animals, and really, I can’t think of a better way to combine the two.

Alright, I’m done. kthxbye

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…

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…