Short: Listening Like a Conlanger: Word Avoidance on the Internet
George discusses word substitutions people use to avoid Internet censorship, and how that could be applied in worldbuilding. Original Script One of the interesting things you find in internet spaces is the presence of content filtering and the attempts to get around them. On the one hand, the people who have control of a given space have impressive control over the language that is allowed to be used on their platforms. Yet, on the other hand, many of their tools are fairly easy to circumvent, especially if there aren’t expensive human reviewers involved. The result of this is a really interesting environment for a weird kind of taboo avoidance. People avoid certain words not because of any genuine belief that it’s wrong to say them, but because there are people in power who have an effective means to ban those words, and a lot of their replacement strategies have a clear eye to keeping the meaning clear while avoiding the automated filters. This could be really interesting to think about for conlangers working in modern or science fiction settings, where the same kinds of filtering tools might be present, though I have a thought how it could even extend into less technological fantasy settings. Before we get to that, Conlangery is entirely supported by our patrons on Patreon. You can become a member at patreon.com/conlangery. You can get early access to episodes and even see the scripts for these short before they are recorded. Go to patreon.com/conlangery to pledge your monthly amount. This topic came to me as I was musing about the kinds of taboo avoidance I see on TikTok. I’ve been on TikTok for about a year now, and in that time, I’ve observed an interesting phenomenon of word replacement to avoid censorship. TikTok is known to do a lot of algorithmic enforcement of their community guidelines, and a combination of creators getting videos downgraded or removed along with maybe some technological superstition has led a lot of people to put together some interesting strategies to avoid potential censorship. One very ubiquitous term you’ll hear or see is unalive . It seems that TikTok doesn’t like terms referring to death, so a lot of creators have used unalive as a substitute for die, kill, and even suicide . Note that this collapses the semantics quite a bit, though context will usually pick up that load. You can talk about someone who unalived , someone who unalived someone else, or someone who unalived themself . The meaning remains very clear, with an intuitive derivation. I’ve often mused about how I never see tabooing of terms relating to violence, and this still isn’t quite that, but it does include violence-related terminology. It is interesting that TikTok apparently censors words related to death enough for this euphemism to catch on. In a lot of other avoidance strategies, it’s often more about how words are spelled in captions, which are easier for the app to censor than spoken words. Sex is replaced with seggs , people put random spaces into words in their captions, or follow 1337 conventions of replacing letters with similar-looking numbers or symbols, like 1 for i or the euro sign for e. One user seems to get by with mostly adding diacritic marks to vowels in banned words. Like unalive , it’s aimed at preserving the meaning while avoiding word filters. I even see people use “clock app” or the clock emoji in place of TikTok, presumably in case the site suppresses it’s own name to suppress criticism. I did encounter one avoidance strategy that didn’t really aim to keep meaning clear. For a while, I saw people replacing sex work with accounting and sex worker with accountant in order to talk about sex worker rights issues. Sometimes, they would call out the taboo avoidance with star emojis, but not always. And as always, this may be said out loud or may only be replaced in the captions. This strategy seems to also be related to a more complex tactic of telling allegorical stories — basically satire aimed at