f*ck, t*ts, c*nt, c*cks*ck*r, m*th*rf*ck*r, sh*t, p*ss

George Carlin, interviewed by the Onion, had this to say about his view of standards of obscene language:

[...] it's always been kind of a false arrangement anyway. When I was a little boy, I was taught to look up to policemen, look up to military personnel, and look up to sports figures. We all know how they speak, so apparently the message was, "These people have not been corrupted morally; therefore, I can derive from that that dirty language didn't corrupt them morally." There's no foundation for this language being harmful in any way; it's just rude to some people, less rude to others. So it's one of those fake barriers that's rooted in a fake morality about sex, the body parts that produce sexual experience -- and, as it happens, bathroom experience -- and an ultimate fear of the human body and sexuality. And therefore, I don't honor those arbitrary demarcations, and that's that.

Carlin's profession is MUCH different from the engineer's. Most engineers are expected to adhere to an organizational code (whether it's documented or not), and our professional communications are expected to avoid (among other things) the Seven Words, regardless of how we feel about them personally. One thing we do (or should) have in common with Carlin: we want to do the best we can for our customers. He delivers a comedy monologue ("the first obligation I have is to be funny"); we deliver a result, or a plan of action, based on technology and observation. Even if I drop a tool on my foot during testing and curse out loud for it, the curse isn't relevant to the end result (though sometimes the act of dropping the tool is).

For our purposes, "naughty words" doesn't just include the Seven; we're also expected to avoid

• racist or sexist epithets
• any other form of "hate speech" (though the speech may have nothing whatsoever to do with hating anyone, we're better off leaving it alone)
• sexual references and innuendo

For most of us, that's not asking a great deal of our discipline. Some companies and organizations, however, will go one step further than providing a culture to discourage us from using such language ourselves; they may try to filter the Internet to keep us from reading it on computers they provide, under the heading of "appropriate use."

A student writing about dog waste-disposal technology asks,

...for my paper, how do you think I should refer to the poop? There's a wide variety of terms I could use (feces, droppings, poop, a load, a present, etc.) I would just like to know what you think the most appropriate word would be in this situation.

It depends on what you're writing. If it's a research report, then

• "a load" and "a present" are too "cutesy"
• "feces" (and for that matter, "excrement" and "defecation") are too "technical"
• "poop" is too informal -- "like baby talk"
• "shit" is too crude

...I guess that pretty much leaves "droppings." :-) On the other hand, a marketing brochure may not suffer as much from informality, and "poop" may work. Again, it depends on the audience.

The Failure of Censorware

In recent years, public libraries (and others) have been challenged in courts by citizens and groups opposed to their use of censorware to block out Web sites with offensive content. But is opposition rooted in the fact that censorware is used? Or rather in the methods software uses to sensor: primarily by keyword searching, secondarily (if we're lucky) by human reviewers. Wired News reported that CyberPatrol's filtering software detected "Full Nude Sex Acts" in

• a Nike ad
• The National Academy of Clinical Biochemistry
• The MIT Project on Mathematics and Computation
• America Online's game provider, WorldPlay

...and CyberPatrol could not at the time explain how these sites could be filtered despite their policy of human review.

Likewise, NASA Glenn Research Center once had a filter in place based on keywords, so employees could not visit sites like

• Lawrence Livermore National Labs' "e-print archive" (http://xxx.lanl.gov, keyword "xxx")
• Royal Philips Electronics (http://www.philips.com, keyword "lips")

Sometimes even your NAME isn't safe. Sherril Babcock was unable to register for a free membership with African-American issues Web site blackplanet.com because of the last four letters in her name. When she reported this to blackplanet, officials told her her name was "not allowed." She was told to change her name, and when she tried the variations "Babpenis" and "Babdildo" instead of her name, she found she was allowed to register.

The lessons are simple:

• censorware will sometimes filter information that never should be filtered
• censorware will also allow information to get through that violates the same standards that convince people to use it in the first place
• correcting these problems with censorware takes time and costs money, and sometimes it can't be done

References

Bartlett, M. "Oversensitive Censorware Strikes Again." newsbytes.com, 08.18.2000.
Brown, J. "Report Takes Aim at Cyber Patrol's Blacklist." Wired News, 12.24.1997.
George Carlin on the Seven Words
Thompson, S. Interview with George Carlin. The Onion, 2001.

What You Can Do

1. Don't take corporate cultures personally. Our responsibility to our co-workers exists because we as a group have a responsibility to our customers. Even if elements of language aren't offensive to our customers, they aren't irrelevant either.
2. Don't assume an organizational standard of appropriate language is anything more far-reaching than what it is.
3. Don't depend on software to keep inappropriate material from your computer or anyone else's. You'll end up spending more time trying to find ways to access incorrectly filtered, important material (through a system with seemingly arbitrary filtering methods) than it's worth. (I personally allow an exception for filtering your young children, which is somewhat more dependable.)