Wiktionary:Requests for verification archive/November 2010

@#$%

Appendix:Unsupported_titles/Profanity Substitution for vulgarity. I'd like to see citations for wacky unsearchable things like this. Equinox ◑ 20:52, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Do you doubt its existence, or are you merely presenting this an exercise for the citer?—msh210℠ (talk) 21:07, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I doubt its attestable existence with these exact four symbols in this exact order. Equinox ◑ 21:13, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'd vote keep just for the sheer silliness of it. Unfortunately I know better. :P Still, I think it's worth mentioning that random characters are commonly used as a substitute for profanity. The fact that it's not those exact four symbols doesn't mean the idea is wrong on its own. —CodeCa t 21:31, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

But it does mean that those four symbols aren't a suitably generic place to put the explanation. We could mention "used as a placeholder character in profanity" under various symbols, but I suspect that's not really a closed set. Equinox ◑ 21:34, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I often see @#$% in comments on sites where there is a filter against profanity, in this particular order and these particular symbols because it's easiest to type on english keyboards (and because it's four characters long, and ! and ^ are not as commonly used in this type of self-censoring). — lexicógrafa | háblame — 21:37, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Please provide suitable citations then! Equinox ◑ 21:39, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It is nearly impossible to search for this stuff on any Google site, so I've posted six screenshots of one Yahoo! News comment feed at imagebin.ca (since I couldn't find a way to permalink the comments): [1][2][3][4][5][6] — lexicógrafa | háblame — 22:03, 17 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Besides the durable-archiving issue, if those were machine-generated obfuscations of user's words, all by the same machine (well, the same code, anyway), then they're not independent. (I'd think that the nominator could overlook the durable-archiving issues and rescind his nomination in light of the difficulty of finding this particular term durably archived....)—msh210℠ (talk) 01:38, 18 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've found a wee bit of durably-archived indirect evidence of this, in the form of this Usenet posting. The poster has bowdlerized the text he's quoting (from this posting), replacing "fucking" with "2345ing". I imagine he meant to replace it with "@#$%ing". But not terribly compelling, I admit! —Ruakh_TALK 01:50, 13 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I figured this would be used in comics, so I went digging, and found a number of sequences of characters, but not the one in question. - -sche (discuss) 02:13, 6 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Failed RFV. Equinox ◑ 00:16, 9 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]