Word of the Day: Perspicacity

[hummingwolf]

perspicacity:, n. keen judgment, understanding; acuteness of perception; the capacity to assess circumstances or situations and draw sound conclusions.

I added "perspicacity" to my LJ interests list this morning. Those of you who saw my post of 1:15 a.m. will probably not be surprised to learn that you cannot currently do a search for other users who list "perspicacity" as an interest. You also can't search for "perspicuity" (clarity of expression; lucidity).

Comments over in this post list some other strings you cannot search for. A few minutes ago, I added "spicy rice crackers" to my list so I could have something which is unsearchable for two reasons instead of just one.

Comments

[hasufin.livejournal.com]

You know, anymore I have trouble believing these changes to be malicious in nature. They increasingly seem to be merely incompetent.

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it does seem that a whole group of people didn't bother to think things through before implementing this change.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I already commented on how a simple regular expression could have avoided the problem...

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

But blocking myriads of previously unthought-of variants is a feature, not a bug. At least it is if you're trying to keep spicy cracker-eating raccoon-watchers from finding each other.

[aekiy.livejournal.com]

LiveJournal is beginning to remind me of GO Chat, which was an old Java chat site which was purchased by Disney and then shut down as too much of a financial drain. This stuff is pretty standard-issue filtering material. We'd all have problems saying things like "suspicious." Considering we were all teenagers at the time, some even younger, it took a while to figure out exactly why that was getting filtered. (I'm not really familiar with most racial slurs.)

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

One thing I've noticed from reading comments is that people are learning lots & lots of racial slurs they never knew before. Hey, at least the code is educational, right?

[aekiy.livejournal.com]

Indeed! I'd like to see an actual study done on this sort of thing, because I think you're right: it does seem to be educational, teaching people about taboo words they wouldn't otherwise have learned.