[Ads-l] s--

[Charles C Rice]

My son brought this to my attention recently and I've been trying to track down the service/platform/environment that is causing it, or what/who authors think they are avoiding with these spellings. So far I have seen them on Facebook but only in the short videos that are piped in from Instagram or YouTube. I have seen a few more on YouTube itself. Instgram users--I am not one--insist there is no filter on Insta so it's not coming from there (but I rather doubt the assumption). People have sent me examples of s---- for shoot and d-- for die. There's a guy on YouTube posting as DeleteLawz who uses these spellings to amplify his policing-the-police persona. Here's an example: https://youtube.com/shorts/UF1eMbKXPi4?si=XSwfNb8ZDsVfj96c
"cop slams man's h**d into car". The subtitles include f*ck, bl**d, p*gs, d*es, and for each of those words the sound track provides only the first and last sounds. He visually covers the violent act described in the title. This example might be motivated differently from some of the other examples of self-censoring, but it provides good examples of the general practice as I've observed it.

YahooNews presents a new twist for me because it would likely be a platform-wide policy (or if it isn't, that would be very interesting as well). As far as I know, YahooNews is an aggregator, so it might pull in items that are already self-censored by another publisher.

Clai

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Subject: s--

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url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.yahoo.com%2Fentertainment%2Fadult-film-star-stormy-daniels-033004515.html

"Daniels claimed that she accepted the money to create a paper trail for her protection and also claimed that the s-- was consensual....In the documentary, Daniels revealed why she did not reject the billionaire mogul's request for s-- during their meeting decades ago."


JL




--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org