Blogger — and romance novel aficionado — Jennifer Porter has drawn up a rundown of the common replacements for words the app deems profanity. Among some of the noteworthies: from "whore" to "hussy," from "badass" to "tough" and, somewhat confusingly, from "vagina" to "bottom."ADDED: "Chaucer used 'Belle Chose' (Pretty Thing) and 'Quondam' (Whatever) in The Canterbury Tales."
March 28, 2015
"Clean Reader — an e-reader app designed to ferret out, and block, profanity in novels and nonfiction..."
Anything wrong with that?
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35 comments:
Huckleberry Finn could not be reached for comment.
Fuck that app
Seven Words You Can Never Say in Clean Reader.
The positive thing is that if you can get the source code, you get a list of bad words.
Something similar happened with the office votrax announcement maker, which would not pronounce bad words.
Soon it was only saying bad words.
ClearPlay was a mid-200's LDS company that re-mastered DVD"s with all the bad language taken out. I always figured the copyright police would take them down....
-XC
Does it read British or Australian? Cunt isn't going to make any sense with the usual euphemisms substituted for it.
What a drag. Real adults are becoming very difficult to find.
What does Clean Reader have to say about "time lime"?
I, as a man who changes lyrics at the drop of a cat, can understand why these folks think they know better than the "authors."
Some of these works of "art" were produced by people who didn't go, much less graduate, from University.
Why not just go back to the old Catholic system that prohibited the publication of any written thing until there was a seal of approval issued for every new work.
Think how many less books there would be to corrupt minds with forbidden ideas.
This technology could be applied against Politically Incorrect ideas someday.
Expat(ish), FYI ClearPlay was taken down by the copyright cops, I believe around 2007 or 2008. Case was heard in Denver. Ann will be able to give the legal cites.
The new version of ClearPlay has been around for a while. It's pretty popular. You download the master filter file onto a USB stick that plugs into your ClearPlay DVD or BluRay player, and it mutes or skips things depending on your settings. The settings are pretty extensive and specific. You only update the stick to get whatever new filters have been added by ClearPlay since you downloaded them last. You use regular DVDs and BluRay discs.
There are filters for lots and lots of movies. There's even one for Total Recall, a much shorter movie with all of the filter settings maxed out.
Wasn't Marilyn Chambers in "From Vagina to Bottom?"
Chaucer does use the (French) term “belle chose” (Middle English/French: bele chose), but he also uses (ME) “queynte”, which my dual Middle English/Modern English version translates as “cunt” — the latter of which of course is a fine old Anglo-Saxon word of beyond that vintage, but “queynte” is not exactly that — rather it's a variant on (the ancestor of) cunt which has evolved into the (more) modern English word “quaint”. Check your OED; as my (older) version states:
“Quaint, sb. Obs. rare. Also 4 queynt(e. [? f. the adj.] (See quot. 1598.)
“c 1320 Sir Tristr. 2254 Hir queynt abouen hir kne Naked þe kni3tes knewe. c 1386 Chaucer Miller's T. 90 Pryvely he caught hir by the queynte. 1598 Florio, Becchina, A womans quaint or priuities.”
The OED declares that this usage of “quaint” is now obsolete, but I propose that we resurrect it. Then this cleanup app can change all usages of cunt to quaint — and perhaps all usages of vagina to cunt! (Though I'm sure Althouse will note that it's more properly vulva, that's still much more accurate than “bottom”. Sheesh!)
Actually, there's a term/word “invaginate”. One wonders what this app will do with that — something stupid, no doubt.
"Vagina" to "bottom" makes me think it was influenced by the difference between the American and British meanings for "fanny".
Wonder what epithets Tourette patients who've been raised on ClearPlay use?
While I know the language in Terry McMillan's novels is authentic, I found it sufficiently off-putting that after one, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, I was done. Major disappointment because she is a fine writer with resonant themes. Then again, I was never her target audience. Her dialog conveys deep anger, but I could still have understood that without so very much of it.
Anything wrong with that?
Everything.
Oh, goody. A robotic Henrietta Bowdler. No. 17 on the Inventions Nobody Asked For list.
Expurgation is always a bad idea, but if you're going to do it leave it to a careful editor with a poet's ear. Computer's are bad with human language; it's not their native tongue, and even the best software dealing with human language is ridiculously, frustratingly flawed.
I'm reminded of the iBook reader included the latest releases of OS X. With just a click an iBook will read to you, but it's a poor substitution for an audiobook performed by an honest-to-god human. Don't get me wrong, Apple's text-to-speech algorithms are some of the best in the business, and has improved considerably over the years; I particularly like the mellifluous received standard produce by the Mac voicebot called Bruce, it's the most understandable text-to-speech output I've heard. And yet given a book to read Bruce stumbles over rules that wouldn't confuse a second grader. For example, in dialogue "No." -- a succinct negative reply to a question -- is spoken Number. Dates are particular difficult for Bruce. Sometimes dates are processed correctly as dates, and sometimes they're interpreted as numbers. I haven't been able to deduce the algorithm that creates this chaos, because Bruce seems to apply the rule randomly. For example, given "Napoleon's tactical brilliance of 1807 was conspicuous by its absence in 1815." Bruce might recite Napoleon's tactical brilliance of one thousand eight hundred and seven was conspicuous by its absence in eighteen fifteen, or any mix of date and number formats. Roman numerals are a complete mystery to Bruce. MMXIII comes out "em-em-exe-eye-eye-eye."
The human/computer natural language interface is an Apple forte, and consequently they've devoted millions of man-hours making Bruce and Siri as useful as they are, and yet both are seriously flawed. Something tells me the programming effort behind Clean Reader will not exceed Apple's.
Imagine this sentence "The badass Marine complained about his tough steak." expurgated to "The tough Marine complained about his tough steak." Only a robot wouldn't reject that "cleansing" out of hand.
Computer-based bowdlerization is doomed to produce mealy-mouthed tripe typically, and complete nonsense occasionally. What a service to literature and literacy!
A great Ap. Those who dislike profanity can now filter it out. Those who like profanity don't need it.
A win win.
Nothing wrong with it at all. if voluntarily employed on an 'opt in' basis. Nothing any worse than Jefferson writing an edition of the Bible with all the miracles removed.
As Ray Bradbury said, there's more than one way to burn a book.
Chaucer rocks. It's as bawdy as they come. There's one scene where a bunch of demons pop out of the devils ass. And then there's a scene where a cuckolded husband finds his wifes lover and shoves a hot poker up the guys ass.
its very R rated.
(cont) so they might be able to remove some dirty words, but unless the app removes the content its going to be just as ribald.
actually, my bad, it wasn't demons that came out of the devils ass, but friars: (the friar had been accompanied down to hell by an angel and commented to the angel how he didn't see any friars in hell. Whereupon the angel told the devil:
'Hold up thy tail thy Satanas' said he
'Show forth thine arse and let the friar see
Where is the nest of friars in this place!'
And ere that half a furlong way of space
Right so as bees come swarming from the hive,
Out of the devil's arse began to drive
Twenty thousand friars in a route.
And throughout hell they swarmed all about
And came again as fast as they may gone
And in his arse they crept in every John!
I noticed some people on this thread dislike it, but can't say why. Hence, the snark and drive by comments.
Isn't it sad that people don't have to read profanity.
and actually I got the Millers tale wrong too (I havent' read in ages). Basically the wife gets another paramour who tries to woo her. He's the guy that sticks the poker in the young lover butt.
Pior to that the paramour asked for a kiss from his lover to be and instead she stuck her ass out the window and he kissed her ass instead.
He immediately knows she did it because " "for wel he wiste a womman hath no berd
He'd felt a thing all rough and longish haired,",
LOL.
For a while, I was listening to a lot of Dostoyevsky via Kindle's text-to-speech while walking. I thought it was odd how often the characters used, hectometers as an interjection. Was it old Russian slang? Agrarian in origin?
No, it was the text-to-speech rendering of "hm."
For some reason I found myself watching Snakes on a Plane on network television. Samuel L. Jackson's iconic line was rendered as "I have had it with these MONKEY-FIGHTING snakes on this MONDAY-to-FRIDAY plane!"
In the words of the immortal Roman Moroni: "You lousy cork-soakers. You have violated my farging rights. Dis somanumbatching country was founded so that the liberties of common patriotic citizens like me could not be taken away by a bunch of fargin iceholes... like yourselves."
Last night watching basketball, there was a promo for a new show that had one of the characters exclaim, seeing a cake, I think, "It's a Vagina!" I'm no prude by any stretch of the imagination, but I thought it was unnecessary. They might as well have said Pussy or something else, in that situation it would have been equally offensive.
Shit!
This was tried about 20 years ago, on BBSs, but it had problems with the nickname for Richard and some other things
I was once hired to write a DVD filter. I got it to mostly work, but found that DVDs are remarkably inconsistent with time codes, not just between the 4:3 and widescreen versions, but between manufacturing runs.
I also quickly realized the inanity of it all. First, when editing language, most people will fill in the blank. Second, most people can lip read. Third, it's all quite superficial--I love the Thomas Crowne Affair--Pierce Brosnan version--and used it for testing. Edit out the boobs and swearing and you still have a movie about a rich guy who got away with a crime.
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