Talk:f*ck

RFD discussion: September 2019–May 2020
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Rationale: there are unending permutations of these depending on the whims of the author, making these sum of parts. DTLHS (talk) 22:56, 9 September 2019 (UTC)


 * What are the “parts” of “f*der”? A speaker who is not well-versed in the street language of a language they are not that familiar with anyway may not know how to fill in the asterisks in some of these disemvoweled spellings. They may be wondering, what the h*ll is a w****r? A whorlflower? A woodpecker? A woolgrower? A wisecracker? --Lambiam 23:39, 9 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Keep. I've used Wiktionary to figure out what word an asterisked spelling was supposed to be, and I suspect I'm not the only one. They aren't SOP because asterisks do not carry any fixed meaning (i.e., they aren't a placeholder for a certain letter). And there aren't an infinite number of permutations, because the number of asterisks will never exceed the number of letters in a given piece of profanity (minus one, since the first letter is (almost?) never replaced). I see no harm in having them. They will only be attestable for a tiny fraction of a given language's lexicon, since relatively few words get this treatment. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 02:08, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Then you should just use a list of words that are commonly censored or are common and avoided. Fay Freak (talk) 02:54, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Your math is off, there are many more combinations since you can choose what set of letters you want to replace. For example there are at least 15 ways to bowlderize "fuck", just with asterisks. If we allow more characters the number grows. DTLHS (talk) 02:56, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
 * And what’s with all those replacements to circumvent word filters? I mean nibber, niqqer etc. People use these and actually wanna use nigger etc. If you are not acquainted: For example Youtube filters words in the chats of livestreams. So people use such hacks. Maybe this is also found on Usenet for imitation, like imageboards created (but not thus lexicalized). What would be the difference from some Unicode hack? Is it includable if fullwidth characters (U+FF21 seqq.) are used for replacement? Everything that spammers use? There is also spam sold as books. Fay Freak (talk) 02:54, 10 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete, since we already have "[u]sed to censor sections of obscene or profane words" as one of the punctuation senses of the asterisk symbol. — SGconlaw (talk) 04:03, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete all. I remove any that I find, but haven't made a serious attempt to find them all. SemperBlotto (talk) 06:12, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I am seeing the asterisk as standing in for the 'missing' character - almost like using a specific font or format rather than a new word. There are fonts that render all letters in uppercase, I don't think that creates a new version of every word. John Cross (talk) 19:54, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
 * In my opinion it is helpful for people to have some way of looking up common asterisked words, but I feel unhappy at these being treated as full-fledged distinct words with full separate entries. I suggest that these asterisked lookups could be redirected to an entry on a special page that that lists common asterisked words and their unasterisked equivalents in a simple list format. Mihia (talk) 21:56, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete - I prefer the idea of having a list as Mihia suggests above. See also my earlier comment above. John Cross (talk) 05:19, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes, no objection to that. (Also, maybe we should get an improved search box that allows people to use single-character wildcards like "d??n".) — SGconlaw (talk) 04:48, 12 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment Some time ago, I created Appendix:English censored words with the idea you could look up any variation of a censored word by the first letter, last letter and possibly length. It didn't get huge appreciation. One way or the other, I think offering these censorships are more useful than a lot of standard entries, like cat or human being, where if you don't know what they mean, you should probably be using a dictionary in your language, or even cheetah, where cheetah is just more useful if you don't know what it means. People actually look up some of these words looking for their meanings, so one way or the other, we should help them.--Prosfilaes (talk) 03:49, 12 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Abstain - seems we don't have a clear policy for these, but we should. I myself think that it would be useful for the users to include the especially common ones (the "w***e" example is a good one, and that was a very common way of printing the word whore in the 18th century); but I suggest that we set a higher benchmark for commonality than the usual 3 instances, setting at something like 100 instances ... of course the problem with this is who is going to do the prohibitive amount of work it would take to verify that there are 100 independent instances? Perhaps some of the available corpora could be used, such as the "Glowbe" corpus. - Sonofcawdrey (talk) 05:02, 13 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Delete. - TheDaveRoss  22:51, 15 September 2019 (UTC)


 * I propose to cancel this RFD: out of scope of RFD. You can also read this as keep in RFD, although I may be open to conviction in a proper channel discussing the group of entries, ideally a vote that modifies CFI. Talk:f**k shows a 2008 keeper; pro-keeping editors included Ruakh, Atelaes, Bequw, Rodasmith, and Thryduulf. As for the rationale, these are not sum of parts in the sense of WT:CFI since the components have to be separate, as per CFI, and letters of spelling are not considered separate. --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:55, 21 September 2019 (UTC)


 * In general delete. Possibly we could redirect any really common ones like f**k but I don't think they should ever have entries of their own. They are not IMO separate lexical items in the language, but rather a sort of affectation applied to items, like turning hello into heeeeellooooo to indicate it's being spoken slowly. Equinox ◑ 13:04, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
 * As for heeeeellooooo, if attested it would be included as a redirect, per WT:CFI. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:19, 15 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Keep Each such terms deserves a RfV to find unambiguous uses.
 * Also we might consider how users could be direct to a gadget that does regex searches in page titles to find the less common uses of this kind of euphemism. DCDuring (talk) 22:22, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
 * : Should I count your posts as abstain, keep or delete? You seem to be making pro-keeping arguments, with no bold vote. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:24, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It was not meant to be a vote, but mainly to challenge the given rationale for deletion, which I deemed (and deem) to be invalid. I am also against a blanket vote, so count this as Oppose (mass deletion), which is not quite the same as "Keep". A reasonable alternative, in unambiguous and sufficiently attested cases, would be to redirect them to the expanded terms. --Lambiam 10:47, 15 February 2020 (UTC)


 * RFD-kept: no consensus for deletion. Among keeps I count Andrew Sheedy, Dan Polansky (myself), DCDuring, and Lambiam. Among deletes I count DTLHS, SGconlaw, SemperBlotto, John Cross, TheDaveRoss and Equinox. We get 6 for deletion and 4 against deletion. The proposal seems to stand a chance as a vote to modify CFI to handle this class of cases. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:22, 2 May 2020 (UTC)