Tuesday, September 3, 2024

Explicative Deleted -- The Silly Efforts to Avoid Offending Readers

 

The media – both sides – self-righteously edit obscenities, racial slurs and crude language by deleting letters to avoid using the entire word or expression.

 Who's kidding whom?

 People know exactly the actual words used from both the context and the number of letters omitted which, not coincidentally, match the full spelling.

 50 years or so ago the term to explain a word deemed inappropriate was "explicative deleted". At least that expression did not, in effect, reveal the actual "bad" word or expression.

 A question: Why not simply omit the foul language? It rarely conveys anything of value other than the user's vocabulary deficiencies

 

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