Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2013-10-19
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2013-10-19

by shaenon on October 19, 2013 at 12:01 am
Chapter: My Brother Sam Is Dead
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Discussion (44) ¬

  1. Valerie Kaplan
    October 19, 2013, 12:19 am | # | Reply

    Giggling so much.

  2. Manifesta
    October 19, 2013, 12:22 am | # | Reply

    Apologies to the Office Pedant for stepping on his shtick, but “shmendrick” (I think the typical Yiddish spelling is “shmendrik”) comes from a character in an old play. It means something like “fat fool”, so it’s an insult, but not a swearword that would get filtered.

    • Robert Vary
      October 19, 2013, 12:47 am | # | Reply

      Depends on how he uses it, doesn’t it? “Pork” isn’t even an insult, but it eventually got flagged because he was using it LIKE it was a swearword.

      • Manifesta
        October 19, 2013, 2:20 am | # | Reply

        In the midwest, at least, “porking” is a fairly common euphemism for “engaging in coitis with,” so I thought the filter picked up on it for that reason.

        • Jack
          October 19, 2013, 1:53 pm | # | Reply

          The filter is in his brain, not his hardware – hence it still affecting him when he was piloting the Violet drone. Nick can pick any word he wants to use as a swear word, but he can’t fool his brain. Pork only became a swear word to his filter once he started using it like one.

          If it were to do with the meaning then it would have been filtered from the start.

          • Rex Vivat
            October 19, 2013, 5:17 pm | #

            And yet, he can still swear in writing. That was never very clear to me…

          • mittfh
            October 19, 2013, 6:56 pm | #

            IMHO the filter’s implemented in software – not hardware or wetware. After all, a brain in a jar can’t vocalise on its own, it needs something to convert neural impulses to electrical impulses to a speaker. I’m guessing it’s implemented at that particular neural-electrical interface, but not at the interface between his brain and the ‘net (hence how he can swear to his, erm, [what’s the V-22 equivalent of a heart?]’s content on LiveJournal and WordPress).

            Talking of which, Cheesesteak.

          • soft
            October 21, 2013, 12:30 pm | #

            Most likely they only programmed the filter with verbal in mind considering that was the immediate problem.

    • SotiCoto
      August 22, 2014, 6:59 am | # | Reply

      Irrespective of the implementation of the censor software… provided it continues to add new words depending on their use and never removes any, it is only a matter of time until it censors so much that his speech becomes unintelligible and he becomes incapable of communicating at all…. and from there, a rapid descent into ALL words being censored and his communicative capacity being completely nullified.

      Seriously… someone has to obliterate the censor software as a matter of priority before Nick becomes completely gagged.

  3. iburns
    October 19, 2013, 1:43 am | # | Reply

    Who needs brain surgery? We have Loopholes!

  4. evilmidnightlurker
    October 19, 2013, 4:04 am | # | Reply

    They’re going to have to reset that thing eventually, otherwise there will come a day when every word in Nick’s vocabulary will be overridden.

    • Altarboy
      October 19, 2013, 4:16 am | # | Reply

      I just pictured Nick piecing together sound files cribbed from sources all over the internet in order to speak.

      • Dave Van Domelen
        October 19, 2013, 11:25 am | # | Reply

        Like a profane version of Bumblebee from the Transformers movies.

    • Saberbeam
      October 19, 2013, 5:35 pm | # | Reply

      Well the filter only banned pork after Nick used it about a dozen times in a row, so maybe if he just varies his swearing a fair bit, the filter won’t catch on.

  5. keiyakinsKeiya
    October 19, 2013, 4:39 am | # | Reply

    Dr. Lee, is that a challenge?

  6. Daibhid C
    October 19, 2013, 7:16 am | # | Reply

    Now I want a Last Unicorn crossover, set after Nick’s profanity filter has learnt that he shouldn’t be allowed to say “schmendrick”.

    • Andy4Hire
      October 19, 2013, 4:43 pm | # | Reply

      Ohmystars, yes. This is one hundred twelve and seven-eighths percent a thing that should happen.

  7. Dave Harmon
    October 19, 2013, 7:16 am | # | Reply

    And Nick seems to have realized that despite her protestations, Virginia is in fact a mad genius. Should be interesting seeing him swearing in !Kung or Laotian. Or for that matter, one of India’s hundred-odd languages.

    • llearch n'n'daCorna
      October 19, 2013, 10:04 am | # | Reply

      Or Pascal. ;-]

      • Miserichord
        October 19, 2013, 7:58 pm | # | Reply

        Or Klingon, Elvish, Esperanto…..
        Or simply speak good German, and merely sound like he is swearing…

        • llearch n'n'daCorna
          October 19, 2013, 8:05 pm | # | Reply

          The difference being, Pascal is a coding language. Swearing in that is… a challenge, let us say. ;-]

          • Voyager
            October 19, 2013, 8:21 pm | #

            Ok, now that I’ve found the missing script:

            Just use Goto. It generates them for you.

          • Daniel Barkalow
            October 20, 2013, 12:29 am | #

            Have you read the source code for TeX? I’m fairly certain that it’s got a lot of swearing in Pascal, primarily in Part 32.

  8. eddurd
    October 19, 2013, 7:41 am | # | Reply

    (TUNE: “Air That I Breathe”, The Hollies)

    I found a loophole in my mental block!
    With foreign words, I’m unimpaired!
    I’ll do a Google search, and it will rock!
    This ought to be some awesome merde!

    Doc Lee,
    Now it’s easy to swear as I please!
    Man, I love you!

  9. Shadowmehr
    October 19, 2013, 9:39 am | # | Reply

    (sigh) There are no words for what you’ve done Ginny . . . .

    Although Nick is going to find a few new ones for you in the future.

  10. Andrew
    October 19, 2013, 10:23 am | # | Reply

    If he starts swearing in Klingon, I’m leaving.

    • roberttheaddled
      October 19, 2013, 2:41 pm | # | Reply

      Klintzhai.

      Klingon is a Federation-ism. Much like the Japanese name for their country is not pronounced “Japan”

      Even the word “English” referring to the language – is more like ‘eigo’ as in “eigo o hane shima su ka” means “do you speak English?”

      • Rex Vivat
        October 19, 2013, 5:25 pm | # | Reply

        So you go around saying Nihongo, Française, Deustch or Español when you’re speaking in English? “Japan” is, in fact, the correct English word to refer to that specific Asian country, and Klingon the correct English word for that specific Sci-Fi language.

  11. Bruce Bergman
    October 19, 2013, 10:55 am | # | Reply

    Hush, Virginia. Or the MPAA will buy themselves a Yiddish-English Dictionary, then go back and re-rate every Mel Brooks movie with an X

  12. Jack
    October 19, 2013, 10:56 am | # | Reply

    My copy of the new Skin Horse book just came! With a Sweetheart sketch!

  13. commodorejohn
    October 19, 2013, 11:14 am | # | Reply

    And Skin Horse proves Brooks’s Theorem, “there is nothing so funny that it cannot be made funnier by adding Yiddish.”

    • Bruce Lawrence Bergman
      October 21, 2013, 12:57 pm | # | Reply

      Just the character names – Lily Von Schtupp, for openers. There’s a reason she was always Tired. So Tired.

      • wizard4169
        February 4, 2021, 8:40 am | # | Reply

        She did say everything below the waist was kaput…

  14. Rex Vivat
    October 19, 2013, 1:14 pm | # | Reply

    I wonder why Nick is using Yiddish in that last panel? “Mishugena” is not a swearword.

    • BMunro
      October 19, 2013, 1:47 pm | # | Reply

      Just demonstrating his multilingual fluency…

    • iburns
      October 20, 2013, 11:59 am | # | Reply

      He’s calling her a crazy genius instead of an effing genius. Why shouldn’t he use yiddish?

  15. davidbreslin101
    October 19, 2013, 2:22 pm | # | Reply

    Please, please let Nick start swearing in Chinese?

    • kag
      October 19, 2013, 4:45 pm | # | Reply

      They have to save that for the Firefly crossover.

  16. Andorxor
    October 19, 2013, 5:17 pm | # | Reply

    Looks like they need language packs for Nicks swear filter

  17. Voyager
    October 19, 2013, 8:16 pm | # | Reply

    Goto

  18. Voyager
    October 19, 2013, 8:18 pm | # | Reply

    Ok, there’s some script that’s not working right, so we’ll try re-enabling them one by one, and see which one works. This one is gravatar.com

    • Voyager
      October 19, 2013, 8:20 pm | # | Reply

      quantserve.com?

  19. Mikemike
    October 24, 2019, 2:19 am | # | Reply

    …hey, is this foreshadowing, I wonder? Him calling her a mad genius?

    • awgiedawgie
      October 24, 2019, 10:11 am | # | Reply

      Not as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been saying all along that she’s Mad, but she was very young when she crossed over, and her parents taught her to act normal, so she actually believes that she’s sane.

      And I’m not the only one who believes she’s Mad. See Dave Harmon’s comment farther up on this page, for example.

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