Interesting day! Quietly loving how the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) operates 🙂

The BSA is a New Zealand government body created under the Broadcasting Act 1989. Their function is to “receive and determine complaints from persons who are dissatisfied with the outcome of complaints made to broadcasters”, and to encourage the development and observance by broadcasters of codes of broadcasting practice to protect children, and the processes around the portrayal of violence. Every broadcaster is responsible for maintaining in their programmes and their presentation standards that are consistent with the observance of good taste and decency. 

They’re currently making this HUGE power-grab for being able to censor on-line media providers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kobYNrq_OWM arguing that online platforms like The Platform come under their mandate as being “broadcasters” who transmit programmes by other means of telecommunication for reception by the public by means of a “broadcasting receiving apparatus” (ie: a computer). If successful in extending their mandate to the internet, they hope to impose their standards of good taste and decency onto organisations who have deliberately chosen to leave the radio and television broadcast mediums in order to avoid the BSA and to be able to say whatever they want.

You can’t say that!

In order to figure out what is currently “good taste and decency” they survey New Zealanders about what New Zealanders consider “dirty words”: those words that “cause harm” to the “innocent children in the backseat of the car” if inadvertently heard over the radio.

Anywoooooooo… here they are: https://www.bsa.govt.nz/research-and-reports/research/all-research/language-that-may-offend-in-broadcasting-3/

I had A LOT of fun-and-games with my French friends today explaining to them what a chink, a dyke, a spastic and a gook were. At then same time, I was surprised not to see the words: wop, dildo, butt-slut, douche (even when its a French word!), butt-hound, and gimp in the BSA list.

It’s ok to call someone a “phallus-hungry, dildo-loving, butt-slutty gimp” on New Zealand radio.

Proving every culture loves and indulges in a bit of gentle racism, apparently the French call the English “rouge boeuf”, as both a play on the “roast beef”, but also because when they come over to France and sunbath on French beaches, they all go a bright pink with sunburn 🙂

Good to know..

Butt today, I taught my French colleagues the English word cum, which apparently is the same word as the French word “foutre”.

“Go Fuck Yourself!”, is in French “Va te Faire Foutre!”. And, in a linguistic twist of fate, it turns out that to give your loved one a pearl necklace, is to spray huge fromage-like gobs of “foutre” in all over their upper chest. That “foutre” has both this active meaning of “fuck”, and this passive word meaning of “semen”, was apparently news to my good French-speaking, American/Australian/New Caledonian friend Paul who has been speaking da lingo for 36 years.

And what other English speakers knew?!?!

THANKS BSA!!!

With this sensible attitude, I’m looking forward to it spreading its type of decency to the online world and it extending its censorial reach into online internet stations. Good-oh! JUST what the world needs in these, the most trying of profane times.

Click the above inks at your peril, especially if you’re a 60+ New Zealand woman (page 21).

As they say in the French “langage de l’amour”: nom d’ure pipe!