A wave of forced civism is sprawling the Internet. For that matter, "ic," "uc," and "hi" letter combinations will never be seen again with flanking "d__k," "f__k," and "s__t" ones. Yes man! Do you get what I am talking about? Finally, it looks like spoken morality will be enforced in an efficient way somewhere. The censorship is silently crawling over the ultimate virtual freedom avatar - or so they think.

If you don't know what I am talking about yet, now, when you type the F-word in online chats such as Yahoo! or Facebook - or any cuss word for that matter - the word is automatically converted into harmless *** or @@@. But of course, instead of decreasing the usage, what these filters are doing is modifying the way we type and express our human emotions over the net. As a substitute for the F-word, now people have devolved it to three inoffensive letters, "fck," which the smart-aleck filters can't recognize and ban, but the human users still perceive it as such. If you think about it, this new typing M.O. has the potential to create a brand new type of lexicon. Will it jump the real world like Neo did with the Matrix? Let's see...

Just for your information, you should also know scientists from Cambridge have just realized a particular creepy fact that could further bolster these acronym-related cussing countermeasures. The sicnetsit's cliam taht in odrer to raed a wrod, pepole jsut need the frist and lsat letter on it. Evreythnig in bewteen the wrods, tehy cliam, is recsinadlbe. Do you believe it? I am kind of skeptical. We hvae arleady wintessed the rsie of abbervaitoins scuh as GTG, ASAP, LOL, but waht if tihs cuerrnt ban on udnesrialbe wrods can be trggieirng a ttoal tunrabuot?

What if in a cuolpe of decades aehad, tyipng on the Itnerent and in the rael wolrd will deevolp a totllay distningiusahble form because of the need to fight those filters? I am sure you heard about Echelon, a global spy ntewrok the U.S. government uses to pick up certain suspicious words typed on e-mails such as "bomb" or "terrorist" so that it can lead officials to the culprits. But now, this moral censorhip is doing is soemtihng enitrley different. It pretends to restrict the fereodm of speech itself.

Fortunately, we now know something these censors in Yahoo! and Facebook seem to ignore or be unable to further restrict: Acronyms matter and for some unknown reason our brains are fully equipped to read them at ease. Then, what stops us from making a newtype of lanugage cnes srihp-porof?

David Soler is a biomedical sciences graduate student and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact him at dsoler@kent.edu.

 

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