August 10th, 2009
ne of the most disgraceful stories I’ve read over the last week is the saga of how Apple banned a dictionary from its online Apps Store — because it contained rude words. The dictionary in question, Ninjawords, was only made available to iPhone and iPod Touch customers when some of the offending vocabulary was removed. And even then, only people aged 17 or older were allowed to download it.
As soon as the story broke, Apple found itself caught up in whirl of negative publicity. The company wheeled out a senior employee, Phil Schiller, to defend its actions. His argument boiled down to ‘this dictionary was ruder than normal dictionaries’.
“The issue that the App Store reviewers did find with the Ninjawords application is that it provided access to other more vulgar terms than those found in traditional and common dictionaries, words that many reasonable people might find upsetting or objectionable.”
Oh come off it, Phil. As any schoolboy will tell you, looking up rude words in the dictionary is one of life’s great pleasures. And if Blackadder III is to be believed, it’s a pastime that kicked off the moment Dr Johnson compiled A Dictionary of the English Language. Remember this bit of dialogue?
Dr Johnson: (to George) So, ahem, tell me, sir, what words particularly interested
you?George (Prince Regent): Oh, er, nothing… Anything, really, you know…
Dr Johnson: Ah, I see you’ve underlined a few (takes dictionary, reads): `bloomers’;
`bottom’; `burp’; (turns a page) `fart’; `fiddle’; `fornicate’?George (Prince Regent): Well…
Dr Johnson: Sir! I hope you’re not using the first English dictionary to look up
rude words!Edmund Blackadder: I wouldn’t be too hopeful; that’s what all the other ones will be
used for.
Exactly right. The only way to judge a dictionary is not by the words it contains, but by its ability to define them well. When I was about 10, I had a useless dictionary. I turned to it after reading the word ‘wanton’ in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾. ‘Wanton’, according to this edition, meant ‘lascivious’. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what ‘lascivious’ meant either, so I looked that up too. It was defined simply as ‘wanton’. I might as well have not bothered.
In fairness to Apple, I’d be the first to admit that there are plenty of words you don’t really want to hear from the mouths of children (although I’m the sort of copywriter who thinks intellectually-limiting and joyless jargon is much more dangerous than fruity oaths or curses). But because a word shouldn’t be used in certain circumstances, it doesn’t mean we should cut people off from knowing that word in the first place. That kind of censorship is for dickheads.
More importantly, though, Apple’s stance is deeply inconsistent. On my own iPhone I have an application called Stanza. It’s an e-book reader, and gives you instant access to all the out-of-copyright books available at Project Gutenberg. One of my favourites is Captain Grose’s 1811 Dictionary of the the Vulgar Tongue, a brilliant collection of ‘buckish slang, university wit and pickpocket eloquence’. In it you’ll find terms such as ‘Flying pasty’, ‘Lag Fever’, ‘Nob Girder’, ‘Gaying instrument’, ‘Dobin rig’ and ‘Bleeding cully’. Some of these phrases are utterly disgusting, and others aren’t. What Apple needs to remember is that it’s up to individuals to discover the difference for themselves, and it has no place telling consumers what they should — or should not — read.
Apple shouldn’t take leaves from anyone’s books
11:58 am. Filed under: Words.
Author: Ben Locker.
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Tags: apple, censorship, dictionaries
5 Responses to “Apple shouldn’t take leaves from anyone’s books”
Hear, hear! (& my favourite-ever episode of Blackadder to boot. Well done.)
Oh yes, spot on!
Now who was it exactly who was described as “wanton” by Sue Townsend? I can’t remember if it was Mrs Mole, Doreen “Stick Insect” Slater or Sharon Botts (who would reveal all for a packet of grapes or something).
In Odessa in the mid-90s a thick leather-bound “A-Z OF DIRTY ENGLISH” sold like hot-cakes from the table book-stalls of that city, and I dare say elsewhere too, to Russophone teenagers.
I also recall one of my pupils there, a rather prodigious 13 year old, having just had the new Collins Russian-English dictionary bought for him, and evidently first of all looking up English translations of “ХУЙ” (the most powerful and versatile word in the Russian language, as both Dostoevsky and Venedikt Yerofeyev made clear), made a point of greeting me at the next class by saying “You are from London, therefore you are a COCK-ney”, and talking about needles and pricks, and so on.
I once did it the other way round, making it clear to my students in Poland that “super duper” was an absolutely vital bit of English vocabulary that they couldn’t do without. Obviously not only because the 2nd word sounds like the Polish for “arse”
Fine anecdotes, Dom.
If I remember it right, Grandma Mole tells Adrian that she had always thought his mother to be a bit wanton. Actually, now I come to think of it, Adrian then looks it up in a dictionary and concludes that it’s ‘not nice’.
Apple are exerting over control of a market, and the effect is like on any other market, it’s creating a shadow economy and a black market. People are finding ways around like Google’s “web apps” and through alternative distribution on jailbreak iPhones.
In this case, Apple has gone on the record and claimed it was not as simple as the developer claimed. Specifically: Apple advised the developer to wait until the age control limits were in place with v3, but the developer pressed on… but due to the time it takes to get published the app didn’t come out until v3 had shipped anyway.
By the way there are lots of paradoxes in Apple’s approach:
- iTunes sells music with explicit lyrics.
- iTunes sells movies with 18 certs.
- iTunes and the iPhone offers podcast downloads that are adult.
- Apple’s own Safari web browser on the iPhone itself offers access to the full breadth of web sites, including porn, and illegal content (not just adult).
etc. etc.
Agree in toto, but still dispute the rationale behind banning the dictionary. I alluded to the inconsistency, but my main beef is with trying to sanitise words. They are, after all, the tools of my trade.