On Profanity

Every Wednesday, I gather together a collection of blog posts from around the Internet that I think are worth sharing. This week’s collection is themed around the concepts of controversy, confusion and punishment. Let’s get down to it.

We start off with Mark Nichol who is discussing how to style profanity in your writing. I generally try to keep this blog (and my social media presence) as PG-13 as possible, avoiding the blue language where I can. It may be appropriate elsewhere, but how do you circumvent this problem if you want to to be true to a quote, for example? Just referring to it as “colorful language” doesn’t really cut it.

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. It seems that Vance Sova may have learned that lesson the hard way after writing about Google search results and then getting swiftly punished for it the next day. Now, this could just be a matter of coincidence and Vance’s blog could have just lost PageRank anyway, but the timing might seem a little too perfect for that.

There has been a recent backlash against food photography, but bloggers like Buzz Bishop are coming to its defense. He explains why he takes pictures of his food and it’s because he is reviewing the restaurants semi-professionally. I’m sure they wouldn’t stop the New York Times from taking pictures and they shouldn’t stop me either.

Many of us have come to rely on WordPress for a lot of things, but Thursday Bram is really starting to second-guess the whole situation. On the surface, the open source nature sounds like it’s great, because WordPress is free, but the Gnu General Public License (GPL) could prove to be a business nightmare. One interpretation is all derivative works must also be released under GPL, meaning all those paid plugins and themes should technically be free… right?

But how about something a little more inspiring? For that, we turn to Early Jackson who discusses how we can reboot our lives like Betty White. Every time that we think our pal Betty is done with the business, she shows up with yet another commercial, yet another program, and yet another television special. Remember that success is a journey and not a race. It wasn’t until Betty was 63 years old that she “stepped into her most defining role” on The Golden Girls.