on Tue, Oct 16, 2001 at 04:30:36PM +0000, joe golden (jg1024@hotmail.com) wrote:
> Typespeed is a good typing tutoring program.
>
> We have used it a little bit here at our school. My students were
> quite surprised to see words like whore, suck, prophylactic and hooker
> for words for them to type. I have never seen seventh grade boys run
> to the dictionary so quickly! I am not sure that their parents would
> be impressed with this word list.
>
> Any cleaned up versions of this good program available?
Issues such as this have arisen before. Notably was a local (San Jose,
CA) high school in which a webpage hosted by students added a random
line to the displayed page, generated by the "fortune" program. In this
case, the fortune was:
I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs
of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming
for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're
technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get
as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty
technical before you can even aspire to crudeness.
-- William Gibson, "Johnny Mnemonic"
The page was larger than a screenful, so just the first line showed. In
the wake of Columbine, CO, this fomented a panic, and two students (one
of whom I know through the local GNU/Linux community) were threatened
with expulsion.
The fortune has since been moved to the fortune-off (offensive) package.
If you'd like to sanitize the wordlist, I'd suggest you make a list of
recommended deletions, submit a bug (apt-get install bug), and propose
either a 'typespeed-off' package in which such words are allowed, or a
'typespeed-kids' package in which no offensive words are found. Lists
aimed at specific grade levels, matching vocabularies and
appropriateness, could be a significant plus.
I similarly question your inclusion of 'suck' in that list. I suspect
that mores are sufficiently regionalized that no one list will suffice.
I don't believe Debian needs to concern itself with all such issues.
Labeling the distribution at some level as "written and intended for
mature persons" may not be fully accurate or suitable, but may address
some concerns.
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
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