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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I find myself wondering if the original word intended here was “schmuck” rather than the very tame “schmendrick”, but Shaenon basically implemented her own swear filter out of a desire not to cause tsuris with gocomics. It’s a meta-swear filter!
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.
I’m pretty sure that the filter doesn’t censor actual words or names that happen to sound the same as swears. Nick could say “My life is like something out of something by Phillip K. Dick”, or “George W. Bush’s vice president was Dick Cheney”, and it would come out fine.
But if he tried to say something profane, the filter would catch that:
“Dick Cheney can eat an entire sack of dicksdingdongs.”
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.
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!
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.
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.
Giggling so much.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And yet, he can still swear in writing. That was never very clear to me…
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.
Most likely they only programmed the filter with verbal in mind considering that was the immediate problem.
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.
I find myself wondering if the original word intended here was “schmuck” rather than the very tame “schmendrick”, but Shaenon basically implemented her own swear filter out of a desire not to cause tsuris with gocomics. It’s a meta-swear filter!
Who needs brain surgery? We have Loopholes!
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.
I just pictured Nick piecing together sound files cribbed from sources all over the internet in order to speak.
Like a profane version of Bumblebee from the Transformers movies.
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.
Dr. Lee, is that a challenge?
Now I want a Last Unicorn crossover, set after Nick’s profanity filter has learnt that he shouldn’t be allowed to say “schmendrick”.
Ohmystars, yes. This is one hundred twelve and seven-eighths percent a thing that should happen.
I’m pretty sure that the filter doesn’t censor actual words or names that happen to sound the same as swears. Nick could say “My life is like something out of something by Phillip K. Dick”, or “George W. Bush’s vice president was Dick Cheney”, and it would come out fine.
But if he tried to say something profane, the filter would catch that:
“Dick Cheney can eat an entire sack of
dicksdingdongs.”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.
Or Pascal. ;-]
Or Klingon, Elvish, Esperanto…..
Or simply speak good German, and merely sound like he is swearing…
The difference being, Pascal is a coding language. Swearing in that is… a challenge, let us say. ;-]
Ok, now that I’ve found the missing script:
Just use Goto. It generates them for you.
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.
(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!
(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.
If he starts swearing in Klingon, I’m leaving.
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?”
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.
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
My copy of the new Skin Horse book just came! With a Sweetheart sketch!
And Skin Horse proves Brooks’s Theorem, “there is nothing so funny that it cannot be made funnier by adding Yiddish.”
Just the character names – Lily Von Schtupp, for openers. There’s a reason she was always Tired. So Tired.
She did say everything below the waist was kaput…
I wonder why Nick is using Yiddish in that last panel? “Mishugena” is not a swearword.
Just demonstrating his multilingual fluency…
He’s calling her a crazy genius instead of an effing genius. Why shouldn’t he use yiddish?
Please, please let Nick start swearing in Chinese?
They have to save that for the Firefly crossover.
Looks like they need language packs for Nicks swear filter
Goto
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
quantserve.com?
…hey, is this foreshadowing, I wonder? Him calling her a mad genius?
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.