This Blog Is an Asterisk-Free Zone

It may have been going on in the blogosphere for some time, but it's only in the past few months that I've been noticing the practice of using asterisks in four-letter words, instead of spelling the word out. You know, instead of writing "shit," you write "sh*t." Or "sh**." Or "sh***," or "s***."

To which I say, bullshit!

I never noticed this in the blogosphere until just a few months ago. But since then, I've been noticing it on blogs all over the place. Which set me to wondering, is this some new trendy blogospheric fad, or something? Or am I just dense?

I must confess, I have a long-standing dislike of the "asterization" of four-letter words. If you're going to use the word, then spell it out, and if you can't bring yourself to spell it out, then don't use it. But please, can the asterisks! Either spell the word out in full, or don't use it at all!

I tend to go light on such vocabulary here on my blog, simply because people I'm already acquainted with out here in meatspace have a way of finding this blog, and their ideas of propriety are sometimes not mine. Still, even if I did (or occasionally do) use such language on this blog, it's not as if I'd be using any words that people around here haven't already heard me use face to face. It's just that writing persists, and writing can be accessed outside of any personal context. The joke I told at the last Lions meeting may come across quite differently if someone down the road from me stumbles across it in my blog by dint of Google.

Nonetheless, I've always gotten fairly peeved (or, if you will, "pissed off") at people who act like nervous nellies in the presence of plain, honest Anglo-Saxon. It smacks of bowdlerism, of Mr. Comstock and Mrs. Grundy. My thought is, I may be a conservative, but I'm sure as hell not that kind of a conservative! Twenty years ago, most conservative magazines were in the practice of spelling out four-letter words. I remember back in the fall of 1984, National Review ran a two-page article on the history of the F-word, with not an asterisk nor a euphemism in sight. Sad to say, that would never happen today: some time within the past ten or fifteen years, the asterisk crept into the pages of NR. (It seems to me perhaps the Weekly Standard set the trend on this one.) I can't guarantee you, off the top of my head, that even Commentary is asterisk-free these days.

And now, in recent months, I've been noticing those asterisks all over the place in blogs. Me, I think it's just plain silly. Not that I'm trying to tell anyone else how to run their own blog. But as for me, I hereby officially declare that Let the Finder Beware is an asterisk-free zone.