There’s a new app in town, and it’s cleaning up your filthy ebooks by inserting new, inoffensive words in the place of the author’s dirty potty mouth. Authors are righteously fucking furious; just look at what all these classic scenes would look like without the language that made them goddamn brilliant:
“Gosh darn,” said Conte, totally unable to help himself when the sums involved vanished over his mental horizon. “Beg pardon, Dona Sofia.”
“You should.” She drained her glass of non-alcoholic grape juice in one quick unladylike gulp. “Your calculations are off. This merits a triple gosh darn at least.”
― Scott Lynch, The Gentlemen Legitimately-Born Children series
*
This nicholas was risen for to read the bible,
And thoughte he wolde amenden al the jape;
He sholde talk about our lord and savior Jesus Christ er that he scape.
And up the wyndowe dide he hastily,
And out his collection of religious pamphlets he putteth pryvely
He had a whole handful of wholesome and appropriate literature;
And therwith spak this clerk, this absolon,
Spek, sweete bryd, I noot nat where thou art.
This nicholas discussed the bible with him,
And they had a very pleasant chat about the nature of divinity,
Which completely convinced absolon of the need for salvation;
And he decided to attend a bible studies group,
So they shook hands politely.
– Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, The Miller’s Totally Appropriate Story for Young Children
*
Brabantio: What nice guy art thou?
Iago: I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter
and the Moor are now making a cake for your birthday.
Brabantio: Well isn’t that lovely.
– William Shakespeare, Othello, A Play in which Nothing Bad Happens
*
And Julia’s voice was lost, except in sighs,
Until too late for useful conversation;
The tears were gushing from her gentle eyes,
I wish indeed they had not had occasion,
But who, alas! can love, and then be wise?
Not that remorse did not oppose temptation;
A little still she strove, and much repented
And whispering ‘Sex before marriage is wrong‘—showed him her purity ring.
– Lord Byron, Don Jon’s Platonic Female Friends
*
Well, where is this right mind on that afternoon I came home from school to find my mother out of the house, and our refrigerator stocked with a big purplish piece of raw liver? I believe that I have already confessed to the piece of liver that I bought in a butcher shop and stored according to proper food-safety methods on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson. Well, I wish to make a clean story of it, Your Holiness. That—she—it—wasn’t my first time cooking this particular dish. The first time I cooked a wholesome meal with liver was in the privacy of my own home, fried in a skillet in the kitchen at three-thirty-and then had again on the end of a fork, at five thirty, along with the other members of that loving and healthy family of mine.
“So. Now you know the best meal I have ever made. I cooked my own family’s dinner.”
– Phillip Roth, Portnoy’s Family Cookbook