Comment on Regarding an unpaid bill
Jean_le_Flambeur@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days agoSo if I tell that story to my friends, without contextualizing, it wouldn’t normalize the usage of that word?
Or is the difference for you that he posted a photo, not just the text?
Feathercrown@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Interesting question. I think it being a screenshot does matter to me, yes-- I view screenshots of other sites as a separate artifact from the text body. This could be because they are clearly separated from the “voice” of the speaker, or because they cannot be edited as easily. The slur in the image was mildly surprising, yet I was relieved to see it was not reproduced in the text of the post. I guess it’s kind of similar, in my view, to listening to a song that has the n-word in it vs singing a song that has the n-word in it.
Jean_le_Flambeur@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Understandable take, although op stated he didn’t remove it in the body text, it was automatically removed by Lemmy
Feathercrown@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Oh, I don’t feel great about that…
Also, lemmy has content filters?? TIL.
Jean_le_Flambeur@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Didn’t know either bit to quote op:
I do agree with you, it is a very derogatory and offensive word. But given the context and the timeframe the joke letter refers to, why bother censoring it out altogether? At least Lemmy caught and auto-censored the transcribed text I posted.
over_clox@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I do think I’ll make this my final comment on this posted document, to add to whatever historical context anyone wants or cares to take from it.
This is not a screenshot, it came from a yellow pamphlet slap full of ‘memes’ from the 70s/80s before the word meme was even a thing. This was legit half moldy old paper funnies from long ago, shad during the Xerox office copier era.
I scanned some of them in on my potato 300dpi scanner like 20 years ago, including this one. Ultimately I ended up losing most of the contents of that old hard drive to drive failure, but this one document interested me.
Why? Not even the funny factor, but the fact that I couldn’t get official OCR software of the time to even read the damn text. So, I wrote my own G-D experimental OCR software in QuickBasic 4.5, meant to read as best as possible potato quality scans.
And this became my test document for my own adaptive OCR software, loosely 20 years ago. That’s the only reason this document even survives to this day, because it got copied from the old old folder into an experimental old OCR project folder, as the main working test sample, because potato…
TL;DR - This is not a screenshot, I scanned it myself roughly 2 decades ago, nor do I still have the copy of a copy of a copy of however many copies it made on the Xerox machines of the day.