Monday, February 04, 2008

Dr Bowdlers Catch-22

When I tried to check out the film Lolita I found that all web pages with that name in the search string are barred. I could not gain access by clicking through, for example, the Internet Movie Database, never mind via a keyword in the Google search box

So how is anyone supposed to check on what offence they might cause by this, or any other name, if they do not already know?

Perhaps they could take a leaf out of the Thames Water Authority book. When they finally got the power to send out their own water bills (they used to come with the council rates) they hired a retired merchant seaman. His job was to check that no alpha-numeric customer id number contained a string of 4 letters which might cause inadvertent offence to a cosmopolitan population

Not that I am suggesting that merchant seamen are especially qualified to identify words which might offend in this context, but I can think of other candidates

Stop press: I typed this in Word originally. The Microsoft spellchecker did not recognise the word Google