My latest post for Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing, looks at the relatively recent phenomenon of intentional bleeping in advertisements. For a Strong Language post, it contains relatively little strong language, but rest assured there’s plenty of innuendo.
Things you’ll learn from the post:
- There’s an audio standard for the censoring bleep: 1000 Hz.
- The Fall/Winter 1976 issue of American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society, included bleep and variants in its “Among the New Words” section.
- It’s not just swears that get censored; advertisers have also bleeped “free,” “Super Bowl,” and – well, anything late-night host Jimmy Kimmel finds amusing.
Read “Those Bleeping Commercials!”
And here’s a non-audio version of a bleep: an F-word obscenicon in which the F-word is “food.” The approach seems extra-edgy for the location: Chennai, India.
The double-entendre-licious ad campaign, by Be Positive 24, also in Chennai, ran in 2008. The ads got a lot of press, but The MMMafia (“The Sexiest Italian Food in Town”) closed about a year later.
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