on 6 August 2009UPDATE: The sainted Phil Schiller, no less, has stuck his head above the Apple reality distortion parapet to claim they didn’t censor this dictionary after all. Apparently they had no objection to ‘common swear words’, but did (somewhat spoiling his point) object to ‘more vulgar terms than those found in traditional and common dictionaries’. The mind boggles with Nathan Barley-inspired possibilities.
So Apple has forced the makers of a dictionary iApp to remove ‘objectionable content’ before approving it for use on the iPhone. ‘They provided screenshots of the words,’ explained the developer, presumably while quietly shaking his head in the manner of a Colombian kidnap victim recounting the brutal details of his experience.
The app had been specially written to avoid showing swear words until a user typed them in their entirety, but apparently that wasn’t good enough. Existing, approved dictionary apps, meanwhile, cheerfully show search results for, say, ‘mother’ that users might not have been looking for.
There’ve been plenty of dodgy App Store rejections, but this is so bonkers it removes any doubt that the App Store approvals team just isn’t up to the job. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a cock-up.
The iPhone doesn’t have a built-in dictionary, except within its predictive text function, which doesn’t offer swear words, though it doesn’t attempt to correct them either: when you type ‘shit’, for example, it leaves it alone rather than offer ‘ship’, as it does when you enter, say, ‘dhip’. A sort of censorship equivalent of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’.
(While trying this, incidentally, I discovered that the iPhone prefers nonsense to vegetables. Mistype ‘cabbage’ as ‘caffage’ and you’re offered ‘Cafgage’. What the heck? Bizarrely, ‘caddage’ also gives ‘Cafdage’. Neither of these ‘words’ gets any Google hits – until now, heh – so either someone in Cupertino made them up, or they’re being generated by a rogue morphological algorithm. Theories welcome.)
Ironically, Steve Jobs is not generally known for his lexical prudism. Contrary examples abound. For example, in 1977, blaming the company’s flagging fortunes on the Apple brand (insert your own gasp here), he opined: ‘It’s the goddamn logo. People think it’s horseshit.’ Two decades later, asked about his long-term commitment to Apple, Steve mused: ‘To people who ask me that question I say, “Fuck you! Fuck you!”’
’Twas ever thus. (Calm down, I said ‘twas’.) In 2000 I launched a magazine for the marvellous Felix Dennis, imprisoned for pornography in the 1970s, creator of the global Maxim men’s magazine brand, and a man well known for what Media Week politely refers to as a ‘fast-paced, hedonistic lifestyle’. Felix was busy with the US launch of Maxim at the time, and rarely in the country, so I waited with bated breath for reports of his reaction to the first issue. ‘Felix likes it,’ I was told, ‘but he wasn’t happy about the nipples.’
It was only after scouring our printer’s copies that we identified a picture the size of a matchbox, in an article about salacious websites, in which the arrangement of a woman’s clothing was such that, had the printing process offered sufficient resolution to reveal it, a nipple might in theory have been visible.
Felix was worried – I’d guess correctly, since he knows his business – that this might result in WH Smith stocking the magazine on the top shelf, thus reducing sales to our target audience. Sales to porn fans would also, I suspect, have been disappointing.
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