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31 March 2009

The Clbuttic Mistake

Are you confused with the breastle of this post? It's an example of what happens when profanity filters go awry.

I was recently doing some research for my upcoming post about the effects of spell-check on language when I came across something called The Clbuttic Mistake. Unless you happen to be familiar with technology and this particular phenomenon, you may be asking yourself, what the make love is Clbuttic? Clbuttic should be Classic, but as you can see, there is a word contained within the word classic that some may find offensive.

Now, the idea of profanity filters is to get rid of offensive words by selecting a word that is less offensive. For example, ass becomes butt and tit becomes breast (and I changed the "f" word to read make love). It is like parental controls for web surfing, I am guessing. The Clbuttic Mistake, therefore, happens when an offensive word is contained within another perfectly acceptable and unoffensive word, such as classic, and rather than leaving the word the way it is, the profanity filter automatically replaces the offensive section of the word with something it considers less offensive and ultimately produces a nonsense word (classic --> clbuttic). Admittedly, I do not know much about computer programming, but I would say that this perhaps represents a lack of foresight and poor development by the creators of these profanity filters.

The sentence that is featured by the article that I read is: "President Abraham Lincoln was buttbuttinated by an armed buttailant after a life devoted to the reform of the US consbreastution." Am I the only one who finds this sentence hilarious?

There were also some articles/comments that mentioned that some words have been changed into "politically correct" terms. A couple clbuttics here include the sprinter Tyson Gay becoming the sprinter Tyson Homosexual, and some places have [financially] gone from in the red to in the African-American.

And what do you think would happen to Dick Cheney? Or Dick van Dyke? What other words can you turn into a clbuttic? I challenge you to come up with the best clbuttic word or sentence!

6 comments:

Kyle said...

Hilarious! I bet people in the state of Mbuttachusetts would love this.

Amanda said...

Can you imagine what a person's pbuttport would say if they were born in Mbuttachusetts?

Amanda said...

That is...amazing. haha That Lincoln one...hilarious.

Anonymous said...

Wow! I never knew about this! This is hilarious!

Sara said...

This is like the old AIM chat rooms that wouldn't let you say anything bad. I mean, it's not like I was trying or anything.

Anonymous said...

The Clbuttic error is REAL!

I just came across Science, Mathematics and the Riddles of Camelot Saturday 15 October 2005 by Joan Helm copied into some user's blog, where "Clbuttic" occurs several times. That's how I found the "Language Nerds" page.