E*****h, German, and a little bit of F****h
The iTunes automatic asterisking program in the U.S. mostly doesn't
recognize
languages
other than English. But someone seems to have added one
French word to the list of banned nasties, with the result that a track
from !!! Chk Chik Chick's album "Louden Up Now" is listed as "S**t,
Scheisse, M***e".
"Merde" is asterisked everywhere, but as far as I can tell, no other
French word is; "pisse" gets by, though English "piss" doesn't, and
"cul" gets by too. (Of course "con" escapes asterisking, since
otherwise plenty of innocent song titles in Spanish would get
axed.) Quebec French
religious-based
curse words, like "sacrament" or "tabernacle", are also untouched,
for obvious reasons. (Thanks to Jean Sebastien Girard for the
pointer to
sacre.)
Nobody seems to care about Latin or German (see "Scheisse" above), but
Spanish gets some attention: "maricon", "mierda", and "pinga" get by,
but "chinga", "puta", and "puto" are asterisked. This yields a
listing for Coal Chamber's tune "Maricon P**o" (iTunes is erratic in
its use of accent marks, by the way). No doubt there is more
amusement to be found in the Spanish entries.
Further entertainment: iTunes marks some tracks as
EXPLICIT, but
inconsistently. This is clearly not automated, and a fair number
of racy lyrics are not flagged. Wonderfully, the asterisking and
the warning signs are not aligned. In particular, "merde" is
always asterisked, but only "S**t, Scheisse, M***e" gets a warning
label -- because of "shit", not because of "merde".
Even better: when you search on a word, you get little boxes featuring
items related to that word. Searching on "merde" produces a box
for the audiobook version of Stephen Clarke's
A Year in the Merde. The book
is decorously identified in the box as
A Year in the M***e -- but with an
accompanying image of the front cover, the most prominent feature of
which is the word
MERDE.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at August 9, 2006 09:24 AM