Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From the annals of taboo avoidance: a blog with a list of words that might be blocked in certain contexts. Such lists are very common, of course, but this one has several amusing features, starting with the fact that it’s a block list for chat rooms for on-line Bingo players. Paddy K, the blogger at Swedish Extravaganza, explains:

As you may know, if you can be bothered to remember pointless details like this, I work in a company that produces online Bingo games. In each Bingo game is a chat, and the chat has a bad language filter. This means that the chat master can decide which inappropriate words will be blocked from appearing in the chat window.

(This list is in English, but there apparently is a Swedish version of the list as well. Hat tip to Victor Steinbok.)

In some cases, what’s to be blocked is not so much specific expressions, but specific topics, since even technical and medical terminology is on the list: for instance, ejaculate, erection, labia, masturbate, penis, semen, vagina. (Also gay and queer.) Of course, you might wonder how these topics would come up on a Bingo chat site, but it’s astonishing what people will say on the web.

The old familiar expressions are there, and so are some items that can’t be especially common:

blue veined piccal, apparently a variant of blue veined piccolo (a metaphor for the penis);

spam sandwich, which has two senses in the Urban Dictionary — ‘sandwich with Spam [the canned meat product] in it’ and ‘message with a bit of spam [in the computer sense] sandwiched in between ordinary content’ — but is also labeled on several sites as ‘a euphemism for sex’ (with spam understood as ‘meat’, that is, as a metaphorical reference to the penis);

jobby jobby plop plot, an allusion (I think) to defecation.

And that’s the bulletin from the wild world of on-line Bingo.

This entry was posted on August 2, 2009 at 3:49 pm and is filed under Taboo language and slurs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.