"short-sided" (was: Re: More surprising censorship)

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:16 AM -0400 8/12/07, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On 8/11/07, Chris F Waigl <chris at lascribe.net> wrote:
>>
>>  Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>>  >
>>  > On Aug 11, 2007, at 8:05 AM, Ron Butters wrote:
>>  >
>>  >> Surely this ["may c**k their collective heads in dismay"] is just a
>>  >> joke.
>>  >
>>  > not necessarily.  when i looked at the iTunes automatic asterisking
>>  > scheme a year ago, *all* occurrences of "cock" (in song and album
>>  > titles) were translated to "c**k", and automatic asterisking turns up
>>  > on other websites.
>>
>>  Even more mindless: "c*m sancto spiritu" and the like.
>
>The sports blog Deadspin has often ridiculed the censorship of user
>comments on ESPN.com, e.g.:
>
>http://deadspin.com/sports/espn/man-that-commenting-feature-is-totally--235084.php
>http://deadspin.com/sports/espn/espn-turns-douche-into--252920.php
>
>Earlier today there was a post about similar censorship on
>FoxSports.com, where "BLEEP" is inserted in place of offending words:
>
>http://deadspin.com/sports/whatever-happened-to-sterling-hitchbleep/fox-sports-protects-us-from-the-horrors-of-boof-288512.php
>
>Referencing censored bits here:
>
>http://community.foxsports.com/blogs/Morisato/2006/07/13/The_Worst_Trades_In_Baseball_History
>
>"The San Francisco Giants trade pitchers Joe Nathan, Francisco
>Liriano, and BLEEP  Bonser to Twins for A.J. Pierzynski." [censoring
>"Boof" Bonser]
>

Note that this one (besides the "potty-mouth" reference to Boof...er,
BLEEP Bonser) also sports a lovely eggcorn; one of the "worst trades
of all time" was the Tigers trading the future first-ballot Hall of
Fame starter/closer John Smoltz to the Braves in 1987 for the briefly
competent Doyle Alexander, characterized by the blogger as "a
short-sided trade" on Detroit's part, nicely tossing "short-sighted"
and "one-sided" into the Osterizer and pressing "BLEND".

(This one is Language-Logged by Mark Liberman at
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002324.html
[posted, as it happens, on the day I turned 60], but the cites Mark
records don't have the two-way understanding present above, where
"one-sided" is clearly a component, given the nature of the blog.)

LH

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