For those of you following our recommendation to use Procon Latte to filter out non-kawaii crudity from your internet sanpo, we now have an update to the Kawaii Japanese official blocklist. The list has been extended to block more variations on kitanai kotoba, but continues the policy of not blocking standard English words that can be used in a bad way (unlike many filters).
The following is the report from the blocklist team:
This is the second version of the list from Kawaii Japanese. There have been several changes. More variants on vulgarity have been added (the original blacklist lets some really quite nasty things through), but we continue our policy of not adding words that have common legitimate uses, as this seems to us to do more harm than good.
Another issue arose from using it in practice. The word d–n was by default blocked. It is not a word we use here or especially approve of, but – we found a curious result of blocking it in practice. For example:
A discourse by a scientist in the 1950s used this word a several times in talking about particle physics. This is the informal speech-style of a reasonably-respectable 1950s male academic. The problem with having the word on the blacklist is that it made the article look much nastier than it actually was – as if the writer was using a stream of filthy language, which wasn’t really the case.
Consequently we have de-listed d–n. What do readers think?
On the other hand, a few words that are counted as “acceptable” by some current Western people are blacklisted by us (they weren’t by default). For example a word for the emission of liquid waste often used to mean “annoyed”. Our feeling here was that whatever the intention, these words are very offensive to us and should be blocked.
If you have comments, don’t hesitate to pop them below.
Also, some readers had trouble installing Procon Latte, so we have now included more complete instructions in the main article.
The Kawaii Japanese settings file contains not only the new blacklist, but our recommended settings – word filtering only (no site-blocking which is used by default otherwise) and other small tweaks. You can of course make your own changes to our settings and blocklist.
Get the new version of the Kawaii Japanese custom settings here.
Arigatou gozaimashita! I am SO very happy with the Filter! It has made the Internet a much nicer place!
Oh yes…one more thing. There is a way to add words into one’s filter without having to go in to one’s preferences (where one sees all the nasty words that are blocked). Simply highlight the word, right click, and there should be an option…Procon Latte preferences. If you click on that, you will get the option to add the word to your profanity list. Then refresh the page, and the nasty word is magically replaced with your chosen place holder!