Often, my observations about Hong Kong and Asia in general are not terribly insightful.

This one is no exception.

I’ve noticed that, on television out here, they censor any curse word that is used as a noun or, more specifically, an appellation. However, they don’t censor (or alter) any other form of curse word. For example, HBO is showing Deadwood over here right now, and they’ve got these guys saying “sucker” left and right in place of “fucker” or any other form of curse word involving “sucker” like, I don’t know, say, thumbsucker or lollysucker. I can’t think of any others, can you? However, they allow other versions of “fuck” to be used freely. Like, when Wild Bill is talking to Swerengen (or however you spell it, I don’t watch the show enough to know or care – yes, I know I can go to the HBO site and check, sod off you hater, do it yourself jerkface, I hate you, ok I’ll stop now) about the rich dude who krumped off that rock face, Swerengen says, “Well, I hope it’s delivered in the right fucking light!” – but everything else is sucker, suck, sucker, sucker. Later on, when Jane finds that sick guy in the woods who keeps saying, “I apologize”, she says (a one-liner that serves as a great bit of comic relief, I might add) “SHUT THE FUCK UP!!”

The funny thing is that they seem to continue to review and censor on an ad hoc basis. I know for a fact that Jane said “shut the fuck up” the other night when I was watching that episode, but when Pops and I were watching it again last night – forgive me, I get like 4 channels over here – she just said “Shut up!” That change occurred over a period of a few days, so they are definitely fine-tuning the censorship as they go. On the way to work this morning, I wondered whether that particular change had to do with translation issues and a poor understanding of what that phrase really means. In other words, if censors are not aware that “Shut the fuck up” is a common expression in the US and essentially means “shut up”, they might take it literally and think the expression refers to an actual person, i.e. “shut the guy up.” Which, of course, would fit in with the whole swears-as-nouns-are-bad hypothesis.

Just wondering.

Chucky