If the mere thought that your children (or some dude you don’t know and will never meet) might be texting such filth as “smagma,” “wuutang,” “trisexual,” and “carruth,” your long trial is over. If you’re Pakistani. And unrealistic.
As of today, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority has ordered mobile phone companies to filter its list of 1,600 “offensive and obscene” words, according to AFP. Many of the words are in fact obscene. But a ridiculous number seem to have been copied off English language t-shirts spotted in the Tokyo subway.
Updated after the jump.
Among the non-existent curse words, phrases no one has ever used and…well, words that are banned are these. (I am not making a single one of these up.)
- Axing the weasel
- Butch babes
- Clamdigger
- Creamy
- Cyberslimer
- Dome
- Finger food
- Floggin the dolphin
- Four 20
- Glazed donut
- Hobo
- Hoser
- Ingin
- Kmart
- Kumquat
- Lady boog
- Oui
- Purina princess
- Smack daddy
- Stagg
Here’s a (via Gawker) much larger list of the offending, and baffling, words and phrases.
The many, many ways that this can screw up texting in Pakistan (aside from really tongue balling the dixie dikes who want to giehn one another) is to appreciably slow down delivery of messages, slow down the system as a whole, filter the wrong messages and get companies and people in legal trouble based on a typo or (almost certain) misunderstanding.
Congratulations, Pakistani Telecommunications Authority. You’re really a bunch of butchbabes.
Updated: OpenNet Initiative reports that Pakistani ISPs have pushed back en masse against the PTA’s orders. They had until today to comply.
“Pakistani mobile operators today said they would defer implementing the list until they receive further clarification from the PTA. The government agency released the list on November 14, promptly receiving heavy criticism globally on the country’s first attempt to censor text messaging.”
Photo by iMorpheus
