Coincidentally, just a couple hours ago, I used asterisk for swear word vowels on HN (for "L**tC*de" and "bl*ckch**n"). Partly as a statement that those are figuratively swear words to me, but mostly simply to avoid keyword search hits for people positively searching what I want to be negative terms.

But if one is going to use an actual swear word (that they're wielding themself, rather than quoting), why pull one's punches? IMHO, maximum condemnation is to spell out all four letters. Unless your intended message is that something is highly despised, yet could be worse, so you're keeping the final letter in reserve.

Oh, though, if it were an in-person demonstration sign in public, the kind that's for an audience of broadcast TV news cameras, I suppose maybe self-censoring the word might be more likely to get it on the air? Or at least that could be the thinking? And someone mimics that in a different context.

Or it could be someone raised not to use strong words, and to be apologetic when they do, and so then the apologetic signalling could mean, "I don't normally use strong words, but this is so bad that even I felt compelled to do so, despite my respectable sensibilities".

Or it could be a non-culturally-fluent speaker, who's learned idioms, and picked up these ones, but hasn't yet been exposed to some of the finer points and connotations.

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fluoridation 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

>Oh, though, if it were an in-person demonstration sign in public, the kind that's for an audience of broadcast TV news cameras, I suppose maybe self-censoring the word might be more likely to get it on the air? Or at least that could be the thinking?

But by doing that it turns it from a demonstration into much more of a performance. Someone who's actually angry doesn't say "eff", he says "fuck". I would question how really angry or frustrated someone is if they still bother to self-censor while they rant. Think back to Samuel L. Jackson's censored line in Snakes on a Plane and try to imagine someone actually saying that. You'd think "well, okay. He's not that fed up about it if he's still joking around."

	▲	neilv 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I suppose it does come across that way to some of the audience, but that might be necessary. When I was learning photojournalism on the side, I shot a bunch of political demonstrations. A lot of those I saw were performances solely for media coverage (not really for, say, the occupants of a building they were in front of, nor for cars driving by). They would tell the media when they would be protesting, media would show up with cameras, media would leave, demonstration would disperse. For those media-centric ones, I guess it would be foolish to show a sign that the TV crew can't easily include in their footage (because it contains a banned word they'd have to go to work to edit out while already on a hectic news cycle schedule).

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fennecbutt 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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