My friend just emailed me: “Kevin is being a f*ing ae about it.”
First I thought “asshole”, but why use the proper number of asterisk spaces for “fucking” but not “asshole”? Rather, I think it’s a swear word with the exact letters missing, but I’ve spent ten minutes trying to work this one out to no avail. Sure, I could ask him, but I don’t want to appear unhip. 
And of course I can’t do a Boolean search. Anyone?
Arse?
I’d guess it was arse.
So why would one word have the vowels asterick’d and one word the consonants?
What do you mean? One has “uck” asterisked, the other has “rs” asterisked. There’s no rule for what letters you asterisk. You can do “f***” or “fk" as you wish. I presume it’s "ae” to make it easier to figure out, as “arse” is less common of a swear word than “fuck.”
Arse! Now I feel stupid. Although I’m not sure why someone from Oregon would use that particular spelling…
OK, I have to ask : why would your friend censor a private email from him to you ? Seems fuck**g silly to me.
Work address.
Shouldn’t it be f???ing a??e or fing ae? The latter would have made guessing a little more fun I guess.
If your friend is from Oregon . . . my guess is “asshole,” and the number of asterisks is irrelevant.
Come to Homer’s BBBQ. The extra B is for BYOBB.
What’s that extra B for?
That’s a typo.
A poem.
Little Sally donned her skates,
and on the ice did flit.
Wasn’t she a silly goose,
Her little *.
Sorry. Slithers back into the weeds, chuckling evilly.
Since the GQ answer to the question in the OP was given in the second post, I think moving this to MPSIMS will offer more flexibility for those inclined to riff on it.
Moving from GQ to MPSIMS.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Why bother with asterisks? Just say he’s fing shole.
Well, my first reading of the title of the thread was, “Need help reading between the asterfucks.”
That word… I must use it. And it will henceforth be my go to swear word.
“Get your little asterfucks back here!”
“What the asterfucks just happened?”
Yes… it’ll do quite well.
** clap clap clap clap **
:smack: I read that and thought “Her little shit”? It rhymes, but it doesn’t make sense.
Now I get it.
Along the same lines, I am curious as to why the censors on TV always bleep out the word “hole” when used in conjunction with “ass”? I’ve always felt that “bleep-hole” is less offensive than “ass-bleep”.
The thing that gets me is that you can say ‘god’, and you can say ‘damn’, but putting the two together gets you bleeped… huh?