Yes they quote fuck verbatim but censor shit and fuck when they say it. Sidenote: Oh what a world when deplorable violence and torture and borderline pornographic scenes are okay to show on TV and yet swearing is very taboo (I first realized this watching the show Firefly)
Similar to this is the "cupertino" effect: there's a number of examples in the first few minutes of this episode of RadioLab (and a few more scattered throughout):
IT's when a legitimate word is mistakenly auto-corrected or switched out by a filter - apparently named after the word "co-operation" being mistakenly corrected to be "Cupertino". One of the examples given is a christian website which bowedlerised* the word "Gay" to "Homosexual" and posted an article about talking the 100m sprinter "Tyson Homosexual"
If it is, it’s big news. But bear in mind that ‘John le Fucker’, recorded 1278, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_le_Fucker) would be a further antedating from a personal name if it were somehow to be confirmed as a use of the word.
There's an even earlier record of a man named John le Fucker from 1278. It's unclear whether this is an instance of the word "fuck", or whether it's just a variation of some other surname like Fulcher.
Indeed, we modern people are incredible pussies when it comes to the more entertaining usages of certain words. If you applied today's political-correctness filters to medieval (or older) language, all you would hear was a single long beeeeeep.
I dunno...I'd imagine it wasn't too much different (barring the introduction of broadcast and other mass communication). There was polite, "courtly" speech and there was "vulgar", common speech. Just like today, you can go to any bar or playground or even plenty of workplaces and hear people swearing or using other language among their peers which would deemed impolite in other situations. In the same way, medieval citizens probably wouldn't call the local lord a fucker to his face or swear in church (or to their grandma) but they certainly did among peers.
How you talk to friends versus how you talk to those in positions of authority or respect is probably one of the first examples of "code switching" many of us learn as children.
If the Daily Mail is the best source, the Daily Mail is the best source and HN should have it on the front page regardless of its reputation. A similar recent case was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10131399.
Not that this should necessarily be HN policy, but I think I'm probably not the only person who would prefer to read it from a marginally worse source than give page views to the Daily Mail.
On the other hand, getting visitors from HN wouldn't necessarily increase any revenue for them as being the nerds that we are, I doubt that many of us use a browser without an ad blocker ;)
