Banned Words List

structuredPizza

I posted this yesterday, it was flagged. Today, I am posting it again because I believe the HN readers will benefit from it. Why? The majority of HN readers work in IT or adjacent information fields; we communicate information with strings aka words.

vardump

Can that list be real? If so, it's absolutely crazy. A lot of very common words are blocked.

arionhardison

"Black"? Being a black man I am more interested in the context in which this list is applied and hope just the list/words in the abstract are not being simply used as rage bait. Edit: I no longer think me being a black male is relevant in this context because after looking further into the list it basically covers multiple terms that apply to everyone; thus I think context of application is even more important and the list in itself is fairly irrelevant.

kdavis

For context on PEN America, from Wikipedia[1] > PEN America (formerly PEN American Center), founded in 1922, and headquartered in New York City, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization > whose goal is to raise awareness for the protection of free expression in the United States and worldwide through the advancement of > literature and human rights. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEN_America

theChris-in

I don't understand. Is "woman" not allowed to appear in any govt. website? What??

julianlam

Sounds like the Republican party would really support the adoption Newspeak. > It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

mproud

America 250

arjie

Diesel, Ethanol, Pyrolysis? Haha, odd. I know this is supposed to be “not allowed in government documents” and so on but I think it would be useful to have a list of “words that are not permitted to be used in the US”. It could be a convenience list that one could refer to to ensure that they’re not about to say a banned word. E.g. obviously the n word and r word are on it, but is homeless on it? Gay? A single source of truth to know what you’re not allowed to say would be good.

markx2

Years ago I worked inside Akismet - https://akismet.com - which is an Automattic product. Akismet, along with user chosen comment moderated lists in 'Comments > Discussion' would not publish certain comment content. For example, you put 'bad' in to your moderation list and if someone wrote 'badger' your comment was moderated, and probably deleted. Various sites had "Copy this Bad Words List" There was/is a medication called cialis Lots of spam - email, web, comment, used those 6 letters There was a HUGE amount of comments caught that used socialist, socialism in the US elections.

nojvek

“At risk” is censored. That’s wild. How are we supposed to have a serious conversation about risk then?