World, Writing, Wealth discussion

Yesterday Amazon rejected my latest review of a book, and the only reason I can think of is I reproduced a quote from the book (Vindolanda) as an example of the author's style. The quote was "Omnes ad stercus". One of the punishments in the legions was "ad stercus", which means directly translated, "to the shit", i.e. latrine duty. Omnes means, more or less, all, so the author had his character say "Omnes ad stercus" when things were really bad. In my review, I translated. It appears Amazon does not like the word "shit", despite the fact that there is not really a replacement. Anybody else have comments about their restrictions on reviews?

Their site, their rules I guess.

B&N's review rules are also very strict and obtuse, and when they reject a review they refresh the page so you lose your text and don't even get a chance to edit and repost it. Most annoying (one reason few people use it.)

GR has much less strict rules, I suspect because they are not selling books directly here, so there's less risk involved.

The US (and big companies in the US) are remarkably prudish about language in general, I've found.

Wonder whether crap, shite, excrement or results of defecation process can get you through

Somehow "All to the results of defecation" doesn't quite have the same effect 😀

It doesn't worry me in the slightest. People have liked the review on Goodreads, and it will make no difference to me whether Amazon posts it or not.

A bit of a tangent, but... A year or so ago I QA'ed a project for another very large online presence (view spoiler)[(that may or may not be named something like BaceFook) (hide spoiler)], involving translating keywords on sticker packs. The things they restricted were incredible. Including shit. Try tagging the sticker equivalent of the poop emoji in 40 languages without using any cognate of "shit" including "poop"! And there were several whole sticker packs that were essentially happy poops doing stuff.

There were also issues tagging things like a happy pair of ladies waving a "Pride" rainbow flag without using homo(anything), lesbian or gay, or the local words for same. So hot tip, if you actually want to use a gay pride sticker on said site, look for "rainbow".

Which has the unintended side effect of anyone actually looking for a rainbow, will have to dig through all the pride content to find it - which was pointed out to the client but they found that less problematic than just using the word "gay".

Probably 50% of my time was spent arguing "but that's not offensive AT ALL in Swedish/vietnamese/romanian whatever, a five year old could say it to their grandma, it's the only word there is in this language" and about another 45% explaining to the translators "I KNOW it's not offensive, but the client says it's not allowed anyway, in any language." And 5% actually administering the project deadlines.

So yeah, US corporations can be really peculiar and conservative about words.

Krazykiwi wrote: "Try tagging the sticker equivalent of the poop emoji in 40 languages without using any cognate of "shit" including "poop"! And there were several whole sticker packs that were essentially happy poops doing stuff. ..."

Mama mia, sounds mission impossible. Wonder how you've handled the shit and poop situ? -:)

This prudishness on the part of American publishers is quite strange, given the level of violence, torture and gore featured in so many American TV shows and films. I find this all very hypocritical.

Michel wrote: "This prudishness on the part of American publishers is quite strange, given the level of violence, torture and gore featured in so many American TV shows and films. I find this all very hypocritical."

I merely find it bizarre. As Faith points out, there is a sort of strange religious based prudishness there, but if you see how some of the more fundamental states behave in the name of Christianity, you have to ask yourself do they actually understand one word of what they profess to follow?

This seems silly to me. What is it about the word shit that makes it so offensive to censors?