It is one issue if someone feels enough moral strength to decide what words can be used and what not. For those poeple there really should be a mechanism to delete entries from the dictionary/thesaurus.
<OT rant> However, since those naughty words are part of the language, it would be nice if they were not removed from the general distribution on moral grounds. A dictionary with those noughty words missing is not too useful: if in your innocence you come accross one of those terrible words and you do not know what that means, you want to be able to learn it. Whether you approve that say the 4-letter version of '(n) vulg. taboo. female reproduction organ' occurs in a text or not is one thing, to be able to learn that the c-word actually means that (and that it is indeed a naughty word) is an other. I personally think that it is a lot more important to teach the kids why they should not use bad language (not just obscenities but swearing in general) than to hide the obscene words from them, but that's again a question of personal preference. In addition, it would be hard to weed out all the nasties, unless you have a really good context analysis. "Screw it!" is not naughty at all if you refer to an actual screw that holds things together, possibly very bad if you just swear and depending on your political views can be either horrific or glorious if you are talking about gathering information by means of prolonged excitation of the peripheral nervous system, facilitating the good old thumbscrews. If you have the technology, though, then maybe a better use of the context analysis would be to teach the difference between it's and its, were and we're, cats and cat's and cats' , that it is not "should of" but "should've" and so on. The following sentence is from a *real* business correspondence, I've received a few days ago from the Material Departments of a manufacturing company, that should remain anonym: Kindly provide me yr best price, leadtime & payment term for qty of 1pc, 10pcs & 20pcs. Not to mention that instead of the the "Dear Mr. ..." the email simply started with "Hi". I've never heard of them before, so that was their introduction. Writing your and not yr or ur, you and not u is possibly more important in the long run than trying to hide vulgar words. As they grow up, kids will learn the obscenities, no matter what you do. But if they don't learn to write the normal words correctly or to form coherent and grammatically more-or-less correct sentences when they want to express themselves, that will haunt them for their life. I heard that in the past there were some institutions, I think they were called "schools", that put some effort in that regards, while other people took most of the responsibility of teaching the concept of "good" and "bad", including the use or avoidance of particular words and expressions. "Parents" was the term, if I recall correctly. </OT rant> Zoltan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
