I think Star Jones on The View said “Praise Jesus” about something & ABC cut “Jesus”.
So if your school had a cooking class, would the kids be probability-cubing potatoes?
Playing cards are used for gambling. What would you call those – paperware random number/monarchical/symbolic sign generators?
life is made complicated by trying to represent it with symbols
It’s not quite the same thing, but in my 9th grade English class, we were going around the classroom reading Of Mice and Men out loud. It was then Wendy’s turn. She announced to the class she wasn’t reading any of the “bad” words. So when she came to “damn” and “hell” (which I’m sure made up less than 0.1% of the words in her paragraph), she substituted silence.
I felt embarrassed for her.
How about Opportunity Rectangles?
And the Roulette ball is… a Random Number Discovery Sphere.
Blackjack? I think you mean African-American John.
Heh. Horses are ‘random race-winner generators’, too, I suppose.
This thread should I think be called “recreationally outrageous acts of censorship.”
One along the lines of the examples in this thread that I always liked the result of better is from Monty Python. One of the rare Terry Gilliam bits I can stand. The one where the handsome prince finds the spot on his cheek, ignores it and shortly thereafter dies of…something. Supposedly it was originally “cancer” but someone overdubbed “gangrene” in a voice that could hardly be more unlike the voice speaking the rest of the line. I always thought it was deliberate and find it hysterical, but people have commented in threads here that supposedly not even the Pythons know how it happened.
Many years ago when I was in in high school, somebody was taking pictures for the yearbook or similar purpose.
They’d taken pictures of “behind the scenes” type stuff like the library staff, kitchen/cafeteria staff, the radio and TV stations, and stuff like that. One of the pictures was of someone editing audio tape. Very innocent close-up shot of tape and hands and the assorted whatnots involved in the process.
Somebody got all huffy and self-righteous and hollered all around that there was a razor blade in the photo. Didn’t matter that back in this era, you were supposed to use demagnetized razor blades to edit tape, but they were ranting on about how it was suicidal ideation, and they wanted psychiatric evaluations of the photographer and the person editing tape.
I recall they were laughed at pretty well as nobody else on the staff equated tape editing with suicide. Guess they were just ahead of the times - nobody had heard of AIDS, personal computers, CDs or political correctness.
I mentioned this in another thread, but it fits well in this one.
Several years ago, I was a counselor at a Girl Scout camp. When referring to pesky little arachnids whose bites cause itchy welts, we were told not to use the word “chiggers.” Instead, we were to call them “harvest mites.” Someone among the Powers That Be thought that “chigger” was uncomfortably similar to a word that is used as a racial slur.
I was very surprised that we were still allowed to refer to “Brownie Scouts.”
I thought it was because one of the Pythons- maybe John Cleese?- didn’t think cancer was something to joke about.
In 10th grade we read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Our books themselves were completely uncensored, but our teacher insisted we say “n-word” instead of “nigger” when reading allowed. When we did Romeo & Juliet she kept using it as an example of why “teenagers should practice abstinence” :dubious: and had us conduct a mock trial of the nurse and friar. For some reason she showed the '68 version. When Romeo’s ass apeared onscreen she held a white sheet of paper up to the screen (which we could see through) and tried to fast-forward (she hit slow instead 
). In constrast in social studies class that year we watched a documentary on the Vietnam War made up of footage of soldiers in the field. Lots of full frontal male nudity there, but we people started snickering the all our teacher did was tell them to “Grow up”.
Every time I’ve heard one of the Pythons address it they’ve always said that they don’t know what happened. They could well be lying.
I can’t help but notice most of the examples are high school academia. I think maybe there’s a spine-ectomy requirement before you can become a H.S. administrator.
In the opposite vein, when DesertLass was a Senior, her class play was Cabaret – complete and unbowlderized so far as I could tell. Afterwards I remarked to her how my Senior class play was Arsenic and Old Lace and there was a big to-do about whether Mortimer’s line, “I’m a bastard!” would be kept. It wasn’t.
On a visit to Stone Mountain Park many years ago, we watched the laser light show projected on the granite face of the mountain. There was also a P.A. voiceover for the show, which informed us that the Civil War was fought over “differences between the way people lived in the North and the South.”
Like, um … slavery, ya think? was the first thing I and probably most other visitors to the park immediately thought.
That teacher is an idiot. Shakespeare made damn sure that Romeo and Juliet were MARRIED before they did the nasty, didn’t she notice? Regardless of whether the friar SHOULD have married the two, the point is that he DID, because pre-marital sex wouldn’t have flown any easier in the late 16th century than today. And in the context of the era in which it is set, teen marriages weren’t so unusual; 13-year-old Juliet was about to be married off by her family anyway (her mother noting that by Juliet’s age, she had already popped out her first kid!), so what does it matter who she ended up being married to?
As far as other egregious acts of censorship…does anyone else recall the chunk of taxpayer money that the U.S. government spent on buying a huge curtain to hide a statue with an exposed breast on it?
As a Canadian, the censorship of the American TV I receive is outrageous. Up here there is no censorship, at least on the Canadian productions. I guess they figure we can turn off the TV if we don’t like the language or content. I appreciate being treated as a thinking adult and being given a choice.
Many of the channels available to me are American and while I enjoy watching it for the most part, I get particularly disgusted at the blanking out of so-called offensive words in movies. Like “damn”. That censorship just ruins the movie for me so I roll my eyes and turn the channel. A friend of mine from New Jersey was visiting me last summer and was absolutely shocked at what we allow on Canadian TV compared to what she was used to. I had to laugh at her, especially when we were watching the Sopranos.
Have Americans ever watched the Sopranos without it being bleeped a million times per episode? Please, tell me there are stations that don’t censor!
I regularly listen to CBC radio (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), which is a respected Canadian institution and they do not censor rough language or content. They even allow the word “fuck” to be broadcast on occasion. Mind you, they’ll give a warning that the language is graphic and then head right into the story. YOU have the choice of turning it off.
Damn I hate censorship!
I can only imagine what the Trailer Park Boys sounds like on American TV -
“Hey Ricky, beep beep beeep hockey stick, beep beeeep beeeeeep car, beep beeeeep jail!”
Heh, I can’t say I’ve watched a whole episode of Trailer Park Boys (I can’t stand Bubbles!) but yeah, that show would be pretty funny all censored like. You’d completely lose the bleeping gist of it.
In Solana Beach, CA, one of the beaches used to be called Pillbox, because its shape was vaguely reminiscent of a pillbox bunker. However, the city leaders decided that the “pill” in pillbox might encourage drug use, so they changed it to Fletcher’s Cove.