nn5i wrote: no one seeks to limit the ideas you express, which is the meaning of censorship. However, we do seek to make you understand that not everything that is legal is socially acceptable. For the same reason that we ask that you bathe before visiting our houses or going to a movie, we ask that you use reasonably polite speech when addressing us in a public forum. I, too, found your language offensive, and your replies profoundly childish.
Once again:
I said "fucking brilliant" in reference to the acts of a first-level OOMA customer support person, who, if I have this right, is located in the Philippines and following a script on a screen-- a script that just happens to be, a very, very wrong series of things to tell a 85-year-old woman to do.
Now, generally, in more elevated circles than this forum, the above is called a "speech act." And if my speech act had been actually praising the rep, as in "that's a fucking brilliant idea, Bob!," one wonders if you would have been quite so "offended." But maybe you would have.
One wonders, however, where the offense is.
In your theatre example, if someone smells so much that they're actually distracting you from the movie or presentation, or they talk loudly in the presentation, then there's a sort of offense. They're interfering with your reasonable enjoyment of the movie.
On the other hands, such 'tortuous interference,' as it is called, deriving from 'torture,' is easy to fake. What if the couple next to you is whispering in each others' ears about the movie? What if the person next to you is from France or the Czech Republic, and simply doesn't use deodorant-- deodorant actually being rather odd in both places, outside the capital city in each?
It's easy to feign that you're "offended" in each situation, but really! In this case, it's nothing but an arrangement of characters on the screen. kucfngi. There. Same characters. Are you offended by kucfngi? Why then is the use of 'fucking' "offensive" to you?
In this case, my usage is sarcastic and quite intentionally excessive. Because telling someone to turn off the device they're calling you on, especially when that person is an 85-year-old, is not very "fucking brilliant." Rather, not only is it not very fucking brilliant, it's absolutely brain-dead.
But if I'd just said "brain dead," I'd probably not have gotten my point across.
This is called "extreme or emphatic language."
Now, are some of you evidently rather priggish about the use of certain words, like 'fuck,' in public? You probably also think it's improper for women to fart, and so on. Big deal.
Certainly-- there are gutter uses of these words, for that matter. Please. That is clearly not the case here, and feigned "offense" every time you hear one of the seven big bad words, is what it is.
As for childish-- again, please. Someone above is talking about "reporting" me "to the authorities," which is quite clearly a threat of actual censorship, not "please go home and wash." If you're going to tell me what words I'm supposed or not supposed to use in public, and tell me "no one is going to listen to you, friend," then I''m going to treat you like a child, though the adjective I might use in response is "ignorant," not "childish."
Otherwise-- we are drifting off-topic, aren't we?