Basic Trope: Censoring swear words that are found inside other words.
- Straight: Alice is on an Internet forum and is trying to write "Hello", but the word keeps appearing as "Hecko" after processing.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice gets automatically and permanently banned from the forum for posting the word "Hello".
- It even censors words that, while they could be considered impolite, aren't even profanity, such as "stupid" and "butt".
- If the letters 'h', 'e', 'l', and 'l' are arranged in that order, even if there are other characters in between (for example, "Hey, let's play a game!"), Alice gets an error message saying her post cannot be accepted, without even telling her what in her post is a banned word.
- The site censors any word which contains "h_ll", regardless of which letter comes between the h and the first l. This causes problems when Alice tries to make a post about her hobby, which happens to be hill-walking.
- The filter also blocks misspelled swear words, such as the string "hel", so Alice can't talk about the helicopter ride she went on or the new football helmet she bought.
- Downplayed:
- Alice was trying to write a word that by itself could be interpreted as profanity, but in a non-swearing context, such as "pussy" when referring to a cat or "bitch" when referring to a female dog.
- Alice isn't banned but is warned not to write "hell" again on the site. She's still miffed, especially if the administrator doesn't admit the content filter is unnecessarily stringent.
- Justified: The person who came up with the site made a list of words that needed to be censored, but forgot to add exceptions.
- Inverted: Alice tries to talk about how much she loves butter on toast, but it keeps changing the word to asser.
- Subverted: Alice writes "Hello", sends the post, and holds her breath, waiting for it to be accepted... and it is.
- Double Subverted:
- It's replaced with "Hecko" soon after.
- When Alice tries to write about her collection of seashells, the censorship filter kicks in and changes that to "seashecks."
- "Hell" isn't blocked by the filter, but "ass" is, so when Alice tries to write about a class she's taking, the filter changes it to "clbutt".
- Parodied: Alice is on a dog breeder's website but she isn't allowed to write "bitch".
- Averted:
- There are no profanity filters.
- The profanity filters don't censor text strings inside other words.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Some words that Alice writes have strings of letters that add up to swear words. A few get censored, a few don't.
- There is Selective Enforcement of the anti-profanity edict.
- Enforced:
- "What if someone tries to use those words to swear? I'd better ban them too!"
- The profanity filter came as part of the package with the software used to create the site and cannot be turned off or modified.
- Lampshaded: "Honestly, 'hello'?! How is that a bad word?!"
- Invoked: The forum admin doesn't like the fact that
the word hello contains the word hell. - Exploited: Bob tries to prove that Alice swears a lot to Charlie by showing her something she wrote on an Internet forum that's mostly blanked out.
- Defied:
- The person writing the site makes sure to list all the words that have swears inside them and make sure it doesn't censor those.
- The site's users are given the option to set the profanity filter to a lower level, or to turn it off altogether.
- After having her posts censored once too often, Alice migrates to another site where anti-swearing measures are less strictly enforced.
- Alice deliberately misspells words which contain swears so they won't be caught by the filter. For example, "Hello" becomes "Helo".
- Alice uses alternative words that don't contain any swears inside of them. For instance, instead of saying "Hello", she says "Hi".
- Discussed: "I'm a studiously clean-mouthed person. There won't be a reason to censor my writing anywhere."
- Conversed: "Why on Earth is it censoring 'hello'?"
- Implied: The word "Hecko" is seen on Alice's post, followed by "I did not mean to write that!"
- Deconstructed:
- The other people on the forum cannot understand Alice.
- Members start leaving the forum after the word filter renders all the messages unintelligible.
- Reconstructed: They're having the same problem, so they know what she's trying to say.
- Played for Laughs: Posts that contain strings of letters that add up to profanity are turned into jokes.
- Played for Drama: Alice's boss sees that some of her writing is blanked out and thinks she's swearing.
- Played for Horror: Posts that contain strings of letters that add up to profanity are censored. Death threats, on the other hand, are not, and somebody acts on them.
Back to Scunthorpe Problem.
