I get the feeling this is too late to do any good, but prohibiting certain words used certain ways just won’t get the results you want. I don’t like name calling or casual obscenities. Skepticism about a Bad Words List emphatically is NOT an endorsement of either.
It’s the lip of a very slippery slope, and I’m afraid things will just get more out of control.
Look, the real goal is to cut down on stupid nastiness, casual and pointed, right? You want to cut down on vicious personal flaming, obscenities strewn about pointlessly and mods catching abuse just for doing their jobs. So the point is just a general clean-up.
Given the brand–Cecil, in all his pithy glory–there’s a limit to how far the place can be sanitized. Cece doesn’t clutter his columns with mindless obscenities either so the ‘Cecil can do it but we can’t’ argument doesn’t fly. The current rerun of greatest hits on the front page is a worthwhile reminder of the freewheeling range of interests that attract posters in the first place though.
I don’t think even the most outspoken critic of the new Pit rules want the SDMB to resemble the mind-numbing swamp so common with other sites. One glimpse at IMDb and YouTube is enough to make a thinking person grab for brain bleach.
A codified set of forbidden words is guaranteed to spawn yet more rules and usage nitpicking and unholy hassle for you guys.