As every schoolboy knows, one of the best things about owning a dictionary is the chance to look up rude words. It needs to be a good one, though — one of us at Coast Digital recalls owning, aged 9, a cheap dictionary that left him as innocent as the day he bought it. When he looked up the word 'wanton' it defined it as 'lascivious'. So he looked up lascivious, only to be told it meant 'wanton'. It's quite possible he still doesn't know what either word means.
If you're going to get educated for life, you need a dictionary that doesn't have bits missing. Unless you work for Apple, that is. The firm has hit the headlines for banning a dictionary called Ninjawords from its application store for the iPhone. The reason? The book contained "objectionable" terms.
Only after the rude words had been removed did Apple feel happy accepting Ninjawords to an Apps Store that contains plenty of applications featuring women in bikinis. Even then, it restricted the dictionary to customers aged 17 or over.
Since the online marketing disaster, Apple has embarked on a PR campaign to set the record straight. Senior Vice President Phil Schiller has said:
"The issue that the App Store reviewers did find with the Ninjawords application is that it provided access to other more vulgar terms than those found in traditional and common dictionaries, words that many reasonable people might find upsetting or objectionable. A quick search on Wiktionary.org easily turns up a number of offensive "urban slang" terms that you won't find in popular dictionaries such as one that you referenced, the New Oxford American Dictionary included in Mac OS X. Apple rejected the initial submission of Ninjawords for this reason, provided the Ninjawords developer with information about some of the vulgar terms, and suggested to the developer that they resubmit the application for approval once parental controls were implemented on the iPhone."
Schoolboys need not be too disappointed though. If they down e-book reader Stanza from the Apps Store, they'll get access to the huge Gutenberg library of out-of-copyright books. One of them, the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Captain Grose, contains such delights as 'grunting peck', 'laced mutton', 'crinkum crankum', 'gunner's daughter' and 'Carvel's ring' - some of which are obscene, and some of which are not.
Finding out the difference between the two is what education should be about. Listen up Apple.
