Is foreign for pornographic images.
In dealing with many people with varying degrees of English fluency, from many countries, “sexy pictures” or “hot photos” are often written by them to describe images on blogs on WordPress.com that need to be marked mature because of pornography, which removes the blog from the community features. They seldom use the term “pornographic”.
Others without English fluency write to tell us that their blog is mature because they feel it is professional or of high quality.
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English is such an imperfect way to describe things, especially when there is a language barrier.
as an english speaker, the distinction looks like this:
pornographic and ‘mature’ (in the context of the ToS) are jargon, specific technical terms, describing exact violations. the two phrases you’ve posted describe images that are offensive (regardless of what automattic’s position may be).
i don’t know if that’s at all relevant. i’m also still confused as to how de-community-fying specific pictures allows you to still consider yourself a ‘common carrier’, or if mark’s dropped that language altogether.
I think your blog is very mature.
Matt, that is exactly what some people write, “I think my blog is very mature.
There is nothing wrong with these dialects of English. In fact as an arm chair linguist, I think it is awesome!
Adam,
I find it interesting that the terms used “Sexy Pictures”, “Hot Photos” have generally positive meaning in our culture, whereas pornography is taboo. I wonder why the term pornography is not used?
again, armchair theorizing, having not seen these emails:
it’s not apples to apples. in a different culture, not only are the adjectives to describe NSFW images different, the attitudes toward them may likely be different.
you’d need an American with poor command of english to know whether they were intentionally euphamizing (rather than just saying ‘naked’ or ‘nude’, let alone ‘pornographic’). it could be in a less prudish culture, “sexy photos” is technical, in the way ‘pornographic’ is here.
(yes, i realize you’re canadian, but i’m assuming that we’re talking about the US as wp.com’s ToS jurisdiction)
Adam, those are great points!
I struggle with our use of the term mature because the context does seem so specific to our culture. While jargon creates a personal environment, it also confuses and likely alienates others.
But what is better?
Flag as…
Inappropriate?
Abuse?
Just “Flag”?
Report This?
I like each of those less even than mature.
flag as “i’m totally not into this”?
i’ve advocated “NSFW” in the past, although for flagging, it’s a little difficult, since not everyone knows what that stands for. (and susie bright and others have started to take issue with the acronym as well).
perhaps something more generic would work better: “does this not belong here?” but that doesn’t really fit in a menu.
I think that a lot of phrases like that are used because they can dumb down phrases so that people will tolerate it more and eventually grow to love it. Words like pornography have a bad connotation and it is considered by some to be a disease. So they use subtle phrases to make people satisfied with their actions. Maybe that is just my opinion. Any thoughts?
in our country sexy web sites are filtered please send me a lot of very very hot sexy pictures&films Iam irany.
I suspect this may not just be a linguistic issue, but a cultural one. Many countries in mainland Europe have a far more liberal attitude towards public nudity than the US, and may well reserve relatively technical terms such as ‘pornography’ for particularly hardcore or even illegal stuff.
Why not do away with the troublesome ambiguous terminology and have a rating system? U for Club Penguin blogs, PG for anything by a grown-up, R to keep the kiddies away from the occasional iffy YouTube clip and X for porn. Allow users to decide for themselves which levels they want to be exposed to. You could then include X-rated blogs in the tag and dashboard pages of any users who have ticked a box confirming they are willing to see such content and that it is legal for them to do so in their jurisdiction. Much less patronising than hiding them from everyone, which discourages self-reporting and hence results in more adult material on public display rather than less.
The differences between “sexy” and pornography area very big!
The problem is also in the fact that there are different concepts of what is deserving of the label “pornography”. Sexy and Hot pictures might include nudity, or semi-nude displays of some sensual sort. So it’s called “porno” if there’s nudity right? Well, there’s a difference between nudity and pornography also. That’s the blurred distinction.
I saw a discussion how the english language is changing rapidly and soon native english speakers will be outnumbered by those that speak english as a second or third language.
This in turn is morphing the language into a simplified version of english that drops many of the nuances that those of us that grew up as english speakers take for granted.
Also many words are ambiguous, like hot meaning hot in heat or hot meaning hot as a term of beauty for example. Stuff like that makes reading any language with a dictionary potentially very confusing.
it is sad that the word “adult” seems to only refer to nudity, even if it is artistic, whereas gory violence is not considered adult
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bananas are pornographic but they are also a fruit. Depends how you look at it really.