I, true to form, am confused. I’ve seen this happen quite a bit, but am not quite sure what to make of it. Several posters I’ve seen in certain threads will consistently hyphen out words, most commonly God (that is, G-d or [for the more creative] G;jd). I also saw someone hyphening out semen.
For the latter, I could understand if it were just some desire not to use the word, as seen in much Victorian literature (D–n, and so forth). For the former, however, I’m at a loss. The best guess I had was to keep the thread from showing up on searches, but that didn’t quite make sense to me.
Some people do not feel comfortable writing the word God because of religious reasons. Someone more knowledgeable about such matters will be along shortly (or before I finish typing) to explain. I believe there are certain religions/denominations that expressly request (demand?) that a follower not write the name of God.
Sure, some Jews and (apparently) some Christians believe that since God is eternal, one doesn’t put God’s name on a finite medium, like paper or a message board. If the paper decays, taking God’s name with it, it’s an insult to God. I don’t think there’s a commandment about it, I just think it’s done as a matter of respect. There’s more to it, but that’s the upshot. My dad doesn’t write God’s name, but instead hyphenates it.
The semen thing, I have no idea, but I hope to never see my dad write semen.
I think the idea with G-d is that His name is unpronounceable anyway. So the name Yahweh (which is the closest approximation) is actually YHWH, which is yet an anglicised version of the Hebrew, which you really can’t say. Or something like that. I don’t do Hebrew till next year, but plenty Dopers must have it already.
When Paul was struck to his knees on the road to Damascus he cried out “Who are you, Lord?” Moses asked something similar of Yahweh. Both got very direct answers (“I am that I am” and “I am Jesus WHOM YOU PERSECUTE”), but what’s interesting is that they ASKED. To have someone’s name is to have power. To evoke. Moses was in a very polytheistic society and might well ask who this new god was. Finding out that He was THE God, and the others pretenders at best, might explain the later intention to leave the anme unmentioned again. Perhaps to name Him implies that He is finite.
Well, on the “semen” thing, I know a very nice lady, my age (forty-something) who can’t bring herself to use any one of a number of polite euphemisms for “penis”, let alone the P-word itself. She won’t say “willie” or “thing”, even. She just clears her throat loudly when she gets to that point–it’s his “harumph harumph”.
This made the conversation we were having about her husband’s sexual problems even stranger than it was. I mean, here she’s comfortable talking about her sex life in public, but she won’t use even a simple playground noun for half the players in the drama.