RobinInDaHood wrote:homer1475 wrote:If u cant refrain from using such derogatory words or cant take being reprimanded for using them, then u dont belong in chat.
Agreed. I need to associate with people with thicker skins. Have fun.
The censored swear words we've chosen were all decided on, one by one, by discussion between us IRCOperators (read: IRC server mods) and a few regular chat users who we consulted. Some of the words, like the "f bomb", were fairly obvious and it was an easy decision to censor them. Some of them, like "homo", were harder to decide on.
The problem is one that pops up a lot when we talk about rules on chat - grey areas. If someone says "Ew get away from me you homo!" to you, well it's fairly evident they're being insulting/derogatory. That's a black and white situation.
But if, taking what Robin said, someone says "You don't have to be a homo to enjoy gardening", well... if the person speaking is unprejudiced towards homosexuals, then what he says can be taken as simply "you don't need to be homosexual to enjoy gardening". But if that person is a homophobe, they could mean "homo" in a derogatory manner, and be implying all the negative stereotypes that can come with that word.
If the aforementioned statement were made in person, out loud, then it would be obvious which of the two versions he meant, simply by the tone of his voice, his facial expressions, his body language, etc. So much of human communication is not in what words you use, but how you say them and what your body does when you say them.
An example comes to mind that's used by an acting teacher I had. He told the class to close our eyes, and said the words "I love you." Then he told us to open our eyes, and we immediately saw that he had been giving us all the finger while speaking. Now that we knew this, our interpretation of what he had been saying changed. It wasn't just the words he was saying, but how he said them and what his body was doing at the time.
Okay, so that's all well and good when it comes to face to face communication... but how do you translate that kind of understanding to simple text-based communication?
It's impossible to get those kinds of clues and indications from simple text. The use of smileys and text formatting (bold, all caps, etc) can make it easier, but once people start using bold/italic and capital letters all over the place to help show their meaning, chat starts to get hard (and annoying) to read. If EVERYONE started talking like
this all the time in OUR chat, it would be
ANNOYING AND DIFFICULT to read. Add in the use of colour, and it's a bit of a nightmare.
Yeah I know, we're talking swears here. I just wanted to give an idea of why we need to make rules against the use of certain things. Back to the issue at hand...
So how do we know if you're being insulting by using the word "homo"? Unless we know you well, and know your stance on homosexuality, we can't really know. So, is it better to let people say what they want and insult people, whether intentionally or not, or is it better to disallow the use of one word, with the purpose of making the chat a friendlier place for everyone?
"Homosexual" is the proper word for it, and is not censored. Words like "penis" used to be censored under the old rules. In my opinion (and in the opinion of the rest of the IRC staff), censoring an object's true and proper name is absolutely ridiculous. If you can't call it by it's own proper name... what can you call it? We removed a lot of those kinds of words from the censored list, and pared down to those listed on the
rules page.
What I'm trying to say is, with a word that has so many different interpretations depending on context, personal background, tone of voice, etc etc... it's much simpler to cater to the greater number of people and censor it.
My apologies for the essay-like post, but I wanted to explain.
REKs at it again...
