Heard on Futurama: semantic drift?

[Dave Wilton]

But Futurama did not originate on Comedy Central, so the standards and
practices of that channel and Viacom are irrelevant. The episode was created
for and originally aired on Fox. This isn't have been a question of bleeping
a word (even though I don't think "tip" here is a substitute for a
vulgarism), but one of choosing a word for the script. The decision to use
the word would have been by the show's writers, who work in Matt Groening's
production company, with Fox's standards and practices in mind.


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Wilson Gray
Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2008 7:08 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Heard on Futurama: semantic drift?

Uh, did I mention that this was Futurama, on Comedy Central, a channel
which gives mere lip-service to censorship, only semi-hemi-arsedly
bleeping even "motherfucker" and "Jesus fucking Christ!"?

-Wilson

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 9:56 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
-----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Heard on Futurama: semantic drift?
>
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---
>
> At 9:39 PM -0400 8/6/08, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>Robot BE-speaker:
>>
>>"I ain't down with this 'Kwanzaa' _tip_ [there being only a single
>>Kwanzaa gift, a booklet entitled, "What Is Kwanzaa?"]!"
>>
>>Presumably, "'Kwanzaa' _tip_ means "'Kwanzaa' bullshit" or some such.
>
> Just a substitution of "tip" for "shit" I'd guess, given the fact
> that even on (basic) cable you still can't use any of Carlin's seven
> magic words.
>
>>
>>In 'Sixties Los Angeles,
>>
>>"That ain't nothin' but a _bullshit tip_"
>>
>>was a common expression meaning something like, "That's a dumb idea";
>>"You actually went for that okey-doke?!" etc. It appears that _tip_
>>alone has taken over the meaning of _bullshit tip_.
>
> Maybe, but I wonder whether that connection is really active here, or
> if it's just a simple euphemistic substitution.
>
> LH
>
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