Is Microsoft Squeamish About Sex Toys?
A sensationalist blog title, to be sure. But Violet Blue, who does a lot of sex writing, has discovered that Microsoft Word is squeamish about suggesting sex-related words when she mis-types them, even though those words evidently are in its database:
I’ve noticed that Word is reluctant to suggest some sex words as spelling alternatives when it doesn’t recognize what I wrote. For instance, if I write “Windoze” and spell-check it, the program will suggest “Windows” and a few other alternate words. If I insist on my spelling and click “ignore” it tells me I picked a word not in the dictionary, and am I sure I want to continue?
But with some sex words, it behaves differently. Here’s an example I’m running into repeatedly tonight: in my draft, I typed dildo as “didlo” a couple of times. Word’s spell-check caught it as a mistake and suggested the following words: dido, idol, dodo and dado. But when I corrected the spelling to “dildo” it unhighlighted (what it does with correct spellings), and when I clicked “ignore” it didn’t tell me I was using a word outside the dictionary or if I was sure I wanted to continue.
So, it knows how to spell “dildo”. Why won’t it offer me the correct suggestion in the list?
I have two reactions to this. The first is a sort of mild humorous derision, which Microsoft earns and shares broadly with the entire sex-phobic corporate world.
More seriously, though, it seems worrisome in a minor way that a company with so much influence over the “means of production” of written English has the ability to disfavor and deprecate entire vocabularies. Words are what people use to think with. Influence — even subtle influence — over the inventory of available words is real power.
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=1866
You can add words to the Microsoft Word spell checker. I’m a saxophone fanatic and I’m constantly adding words associated with that instrument. And I don’t mean only Buescher. ;o)
“Mommy? What’s a dildo?”
Not to remove all the fun, but given that there are small children (all around the world in many cultures, for that matter), I totally understand why MSWord doesn’t suggest “adult” words. Though maybe there should be an adult ad-on to the dictionary which the rest of us can install–never misspell fellatio again!
I was sending an email to a friend concerning a dildo, and the matter of interest was “insertable length” of a minimum requirement. Word offered to change that to “insatiable length”, which I thought was unintentionally hilarious.
Sometimes it is the other way round:
A while ago, the German version of MS Word didn’t have the word “Frauenhaus” (refuge for battered women) in its dictionary and suggested “Freudenhaus” (brothel) instead.
Blogger, owned by Google, has an equally unfortunate spell-check function. It doesn’t recognize the words blog, blogger, fuck, shit or any curse word, let alone dildo.
Too bad there’s not a spell check that can solve the eternal mystery of what the plural for dildo is. There are sex-toy copywriters who’ve tried to poke my eyes out for writing dildoes, and insist that dildo’s is correct – regardless of whether or not the dildo is possesive – because “dildos” just “looks weird.”
I was thinking exactly what 2.5 cats said. More than anyone else in the house, it’s my kids who use word for homework. Though I have no qualms answering the kids’ questions about sex, I sure don’t need them to be getting new questions from the word program. Not to mention that a good bit of word is taught in the computer class at school which would put the teacher in the role of being asked “what’s a dildo?”
Adding words is an option, and I like the idea of an adult word ad-on.
But maybe I’m just adding to the sex-phobic world with that line of thinking. Hard to believe that I could be contributing to a sex-phobia though! ;)
What about “sex”? Is that an adult word? Or breast? Or penis? Uh oh!
A bit hasty there :P but on this line of thinking, should we have adult versions of the dictionary, a resource used by all ages? They have lots of words that may provoke curious questions (although they would have the definitions already there, conveniently!).
No, but you are talking about the difference between already knowing a word and looking it up in the dictionary (or asking mom) as opposed to being introduced to a word because MSword pops it up while doing a school report.
Granted they are going to learn and hear these words somewhere, but I don’t know that I agree with it being “offered” to them as an alternate spelling.
I understand why it’s there–not to offend parents when it pops up a word. However, it should be configurable, or else it should note the presence of enough other adult words in the document and automatically realize the subject matter is adult and such suggestions are ok.
But it’s also perfectly possible for a child to be looking up a word in a physical dictionary and spotting another. Words in a dictionary are not isolated from one another.
I am a firm believer that protecting children from a larger vocabulary is doing them a serious disservice.
And in evidence of the above, I offer this: “What’s a Dildo?”
That is actually quite worrying >.>
(Is reminded of your http://www.eros...n.jpg picture :D Yay linux!)
It’s not children. What’s the suite Windows comes in? Oh, yes, I remember the name.
OFFICE.
So I’m a lawyer suing someone who performed in Dido and Aeneas by Jacques Offenbach, and I accidentally accept all of Word’s suggestions and I find that it has changed my text to Dildo in Anus by Jacking Off On Her Back. And I get fired for sexual harassment, and I sue them, and they sue me, and we all sue Microsoft.
That’s why.
I’ve had a similar experience with text messaging. My cell phone’s dictionary doesn’t have any curse words. I’ve had to teach it to swear. I’m not sure about sex related words; I haven’t had the occasion to send sexy text messages.
OK kaya, but seriously, how much attention have any of us ever paid to any of the hundreds (thousands) of words that a spellchecker has ever offered us that wasn’t the word that we had wanted to use in the first place?
Not much, I admit that.
In all honesty, I’m kind of surprised to find myself over here on the conservative side of things. It’s not my general approach to things.
I can hardly offer an intelligent argument when I’m busy asking myself “what the hell are you doing over HERE?”
I mostly keep coming back to the facts that I protect my kids from a lot of things because they don’t have the maturity to understand it. Or I used to, they’re older now, but I still wouldn’t willingly allow them to watch a porno. Education is a wonderful thing, even sex ed, but it needs to be done at a pace that’s equal to their mental capacity. MSword is being presented in schools at very young ages.
It seems to be the general opinion here that censorship leads to ignorance and I don’t know that I agree with that in this instance. There is a reason why adult magazines and adult movies aren’t available to kids until they’ve reached an age where what they are seeing and learning is compatible with their level of maturity.
Tonight my 14 yr old daughter asked me what sperm tastes like. I wasn’t shocked or embarrassed or unwilling to answer it. At 14, it’s a reasonable curiousity. She’s old enough to understand what I’m saying about it. Had she been introduced to those words at 8 or 9, it would have been a whole different ballgame and not gone nearly as smoothly as this particular conversation did.
Like I said, it’s odd being over here and there is still a part of me that’s thinking I’m wrong. Man.. I just don’t know.
It would be very simple for MS to have subsets of the “main” or unabridged spell check dictionary. These could be password protected, set by the “main” user. It seems not too removed from the idea that, in school, for instance, all types of reduced content dictionaries are used for young students. Only the library has the 8 inch thick unabridged sitting on a stand.
Kaya, not trying to pick on you, just explaining my viewpoint more fully. To me, there’s a huge difference between keeping porn away from kids (lots of reasonable reasons to do that) and keeping vocabulary away from them.
I’m kind of a fanatic about this. Vocabulary is what we use to think with. For me, trying to limit the vocabulary of children is akin to trying to cripple them mentally, trying to make them incapable of certain kinds of thought.
And I really appreciate that you aren’t picking on me. Thanks for that. :)
I really don’t disagree with what you are saying, that’s the thing. Somehow I want both sides to be “right”, please and thank you.
I am equating pornography with vocabulary and maybe, possibly, I’m approaching that wrong.
I think I’ll just straddle the fence on this one. I like straddling things anyway. ;)
y’know, when i was a kid, eight years old, i was watching Steve Martin’s “the Jerk” with my mother, and there was a joke to which the punchline ostensibly had to do with “a blowjob”.
so, natch, i turn to my mother and i go, “mommy, what’s a blowjob?”
and she looks at me, says, “well, that’s when a lady sucks on a man’s penis.”
“ew, mommy! why would she do that?”
“beats me, honey. some people eat dogs.”
and so the moral of the story, a la my brilliant mother? don’t make a fuss about it. kid asks about a dildo. “it’s something women and men put up their bums.”
why?
pfft. some people eat dogs, y’know?
A somewhat valid argument can apparently be made for either point of view on this issue, but I tend to side a bit more heavily with Bacchus on this one. When my lover was shopping for a dictionary for her pre-pubescent age daughter, I advised her to buy her child a dictionary that was good enough to last her through college. She agreed that was a wise idea, but she confessed that she was at a loss to decide on a criteria upon which to base her decision. I replied that the dictionaries we were issued when I was a child her age, were too politically correct to be of much use, and that personally, I would never buy a dictionary that didn’t clearly define the word “clitoris” for example. She gave it a moments thought, and agreed that her daughter should be able to look up a useful and detailed definition to that word at whenever such time the occasion might arise.
I remember going to the doctor as a child and seeing two containers side-by-side on a table in the exam room. One was an ordinary box of facial tissues and the other was labeled “SANITARY NAPKINS” in big bold print. I knew what the word sanitary meant, but as I sat waiting for the doctor I pondered the questions “Are some napkins considerably more sanitary than others?” and were the tissues sitting right up against them not very sanitary unless so labeled, and if they indeed weren’t sanitized, surely there was no more important place for tissues to be germ-free than in a medical setting. I even examined the box closer to see if it were some sort of recepticle for USED tissues.
I remember to this day the awkward way my mother avoided answering my question “What’s a sanitary napkin” (that I blurted out in a restaurant later on that week when a packed container of paper table napkins reminded me of this oddly labeled tin box at my physician’s office).
It’s also interesting that a popular online rhyming dictionary will offer the word “reminisce” (or even the word “persists”!) as rhymes for the word “bliss”, but never will it offer the word “clitoris”…
I’m being swayed… keep going.. ;)
After detailing an embarrassing moment in my own life and after reading Bacchus’s archived link to “What’s a dildo?” (see comment #13, a great read by the way for those who haven’t had the chance to peruse it yet), I must admit I’m dying to know how Kaya (Comment #18) answered her 13 year old daughter’s question. Xaviera Hollander, author of “The Happy Hooker” once answered the question claiming that all men tasted different depending on their environment or geographic location, genetic heritage, favorite fruits and vegetables, recent ingestion of spices, and whether or not they were vegetarians (Which still doesn’t offer much to go on by the way). I mean, wouldn’t the best answer be something like this: “Well, Mr. Wilson next door tastes like the Hudson River at high tide, Apu down at the Quickie Mart tastes like turmeric with a hint of mango, and your father tastes like a glazed donut.”
This discussion reminds me of the way some people pronounce the word “clitoris”. Dictionaries tend to place the accent at the first syllable, whereas singer/commedienne Bette Midler once did a comedy routine in which a risque lounge act character (in a legless mermaid costume and a wheelchair) named Delores Del Lago asks (as an aside to the audience): “The question before us, is where’s her clitoris”, rhyming the line by placing the accent on the SECOND syllable. To me, this is yet more argument for uncensored dictionaries. At that point in time, this was just about the only time the average person ever heard the word pronounced out loud, and it became a popular pronunciation for quite some time after that. How is one supposed to divine the correct pronunciation when dictionaries won’t even carry the word?
The public embarrassment that “protected” children will eventually suffer in the presence of their peers, is likely to be much more damaging than their being sex-term articulate. Children who aren’t “ready” to hear and learn sex terms will normally just gloss over them anyway. If they are curious enough to focus on a term, they’re usually ready to learn it. Kids generally handle such things much better than adults are willing to believe.
The discussion seems focused on what should be included in the dictionary and the pros an cons of each side. The issue is the selective use of replacement words, not the inclusion or exclusion of certain words.
Microsoft has chosen to add the words dildo and dildos (no red underlining for incorrect spelling) to its dictionary, but highlights dildoes as incorrect, and then does not give dildos as a corrected choice, which it clearly recognizes as correct. Adding it to your personal dictionary, as some have suggested, is superfluous.
Censorship under and circumstance is not a good thing. It makes you wonder where else they have fostered their morality.
I work for Microsoft, and perhaps I can give a little insight. There is a whole process inside MS to try to be culturally sensitive, and what we might think as a minor point – like the name of a body of water – is a reason for violence.
The goal for Microsoft is to tread lightly in such cases. It’s all about being sensitive to other cultures and viewpoints, and trying to come up with a compromise that works best.
In this case, I think it’s weird that you’re taking the “thought police” perspective. The options are doing the suggestion – in which case there is a significant group of people who will be outraged over the decision – or, not doing the suggestion, which I would argue is essentially harmless.
I agree totally that the group of people who would be outraged over that have a problem and should just get a life, but I don’t think it’s a private company’s responsibility to try to educate them.
Bless you Kaya for the humorous addendum to your posting. It’s just this sort of sharing that keeps me reading Erosblog ever day.
I was, however, hoping SOMEONE would step up to the plate and actually answer the question and say something like “Most men basically taste just like egg drop soup, with slight variations.”, or something of that nature. Being a male, I’m not yet ready to go out and actually do the research myself. Inquiring minds wanna know…
(My apologies B.T.W. for the typo I just realized I made about your daughter’s age… If there’s a way to go back and correct one’s postings on here, I’m not yet aware of it.)
I actually gave her the “every man will taste different because of his diet, etc.” anwer.
Which pretty much just led her into giggles over “oh my GOD!! You suck dad’s wiener don’t you?!”
It ended up being a very intelligent conversation once she got over realizing that I do indeed, suck dad’s penis occasionally. Though she did swear she was never going to kiss me on the lips ever again..lol
I can see E’s point: Just because Microsoft has decided to avoid controversy doesn’t actually mean that they are deliberately being anti-sex. I really don’t think Microsoft cares about sex.
It’s just that they don’t care to make people who would get offended, offended.
There are lots of those in the world. They are annoying, but there are lots of them. Basically, it seems pretty certain to me that this is a good buisiness decision.
Mike G hit the nail on the head, I think. For instance, once I saw a story someone had written about Christmas, and she wrote “we had put all of the ordainments on the tree” , having accepted Word’s corrections without paying attenetion. The whole story was peppered with this type of mistake. Now, that was embarassingly dumb, but if her writing was full of accidentally put “obscene” and sex related words, like fuck, shit, and dildo, she would be much more embarassed. Microsoft is trying to eliminate controversy, which would be bad for their business. And people offended in the other direction are a tiny minoriy compared to the people who would be offended about sex, so Microsoft doesn’t care. It’s not a conspiracy, just a boring business decision.
lepoissonperdu, what bothers me is that Microsoft is trying to sell the best tool in the world for typing text into the computer, and yet they seem to think it’s a good business decision to deliberately break that tool for certain users, like Violet Blue, because of the content of her work.
Yeah, it may make sense on the numbers. But you can’t get away from the fact that they are making a value judgment about which of their customers they want to give the best service to.
Also, as Robert #19 points out, it would have been trivially easy to serve all their customers. If that’s what they had wanted to do.
I’ve always thought such an omission was more a function of the limited scope of the Word spell checker. For instance, “constitutional” is recognized by spell check, but only suggested if you’re very, very close in mispelling. Just something I noticed in my Constitutional Law course, where I had occasion to (mis)type it dozens of times daily for 4 months.
Then again, it may only be a function of my tendency to make creative typos, like “consitunal”
This is not any sort of attempt at censorship at all. Microsoft is faced with a situation where, in our culture (and other cultures), certain words are taboo in certain — or many — situations.
Imagine you’re a Microsoft program manager. Which of these customers do you want to deal with: the writer who had to manually correct a misspelling of “dildo,” or the business person whose spellchecker put “dildo” into a memo because they were careless and hit “suggest” on every misspelling?
Office, and its subset Word, are business tools. Their primary audience does not write about dildos, and can get in some hot water if they do by accident and the wrong people read it. The heavy-handed approach would be simply to exclude any sex-related or taboo words from the dictionary altogether. Rather than do this, Microsoft put a “do-not-suggest” flag on words, so that people using these words on purpose are not bothered but business people and students don’t get stuck with them.
Grant, you’re making a false assumption when you exclude “writing about dildos” as a legitimate business activity. Violet Blue, linked in the original blog post, uses Word as a business tool. And it is defective, for her, because people at Microsoft made the same flawed assumption you did.
There may be all sorts of good business reasons to discriminate between different categories of customers. But it’s still discrimination.
I remember noticing this when I was in college, it’s quite an amusing discovery.
Grant makes a very good point. Imagine writing about Dido and the spellchecker comes up with naughty suggestions…
If I’m writing an article for The Economist about the production of sex toys in China, “naughty suggestions” is what I want when I type “didos”, yes?
I still don’t “get” why anybody is OK with Microsoft deciding who is and is not making a legitimate business use of their tools.