A word on censoring, because I think it's important.

What, actually, is being censored, and whose sensitivity is being protected, when a word is ommitted or in some way distorted?

On this board, I'm thinking of '[BadWord]' (the C word) and 'ni**er' (which isn't a '[Badword]', curiously, it's just 'diluted' with asteriks).

I don't get it. It's quite an arbitrary process that if nothing else draws attention to the offending item and also to one's own sensitivity. What are we, Victorians?

What's arbitrary is the notion of replacing certain letters with an asterisk but not others. It would never be 'nigge*', or 'cun*'. But when we read the word we don't read it any differently; the sound-meaning is still produced in our heads, etc.

This addresses the arbitrary way in which we assign signifiers to signified objects; we don't call a four-legged canine animal "cat", and we don't call something whose function is to be sat on a "table". My point is that the only thing being censored is the signifier, not the signified; we're deleting an image, not its associated meaning.

I don't know what produces oversensitivity, neither historically nor socially, but I do know it can often neglect both history and society. If you're sensitive to cursing in and of itself - as opposed to the contexts in which it can occur - then you're probably sensitive to a whole other lump of things, including a recommendation to 'chill out'.

There is I guess the argument that censoring random letters in words 'spoils the fun in and/or incentive to curse in the first place', but I think that's idealist self-projection. Who here would really start typing the C word left right and centre if its automatic ban was lifted?

I think it's double self-projection: cursing is cultural, and censoring language is censoring culture, which inherently elevates one's own above others'. It's liberal exclusivism.

The only way to effectively censor particular words is to forbid language itself, which is impossible.

Tolerance is a two-way process.