This Font Blurs Profanity and Prompts You to Use More Inclusive Language

Photo: Rene Ramos (Shutterstock)

If you’re someone who enjoys a good expletive, you may have found yourself in the position of unintentionally including one in an email—or at the very least, have wanted to. Depending on where and with whom you work, that may be frowned upon, or even automatically trigger an email surveillance system, if your company has one. One way to help curb (or at least become more aware of) this habit is by downloading a font that blurs curse words and promotes anti-racist and inclusive language. Here’s what to know.

How to download the font with a lot of features

First of all, the name of the font is The Polite Type, and it was developed by Finnish tech company TietoEVRY. We first found out about it from a post on Creative Bloq. You can download the font for free here. Anyway, let’s get to the features.

Curse control

This part is pretty straightforward. You just type a word or sentence, and the font automatically blurs what it considers to be insults, slurs or other offensive language. The tricky part is, it has its own idea of what constitutes offensive language. So, for instance, “fuck” and “asshole” are blurred, while “shit” and “crap” are not. “Douche” and “bastard” are both blurred as well.

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And then in other cases, it automatically swaps the words they’ve deemed offensive with an alternative. Like, “bitch” automatically morphs into “female dog,” “c*nt” becomes “vulva” and “cock” becomes “rooster.”

Inclusive language and anti-bullying

Technically, the profanity part is just one component of the font’s primary aim of encouraging inclusive language as a way to help prevent cyberbullying. There is a strong anti-racism component, which changes anything offensive to the more inclusive term.

It also changes words or phrases to make them kinder. For example, it changes “I hate you” to “I disagree with you.” And “you are ugly” becomes “you are not traditionally beautiful,” while “you’re stupid” becomes “you’re silly.” “You’re crazy,” on the other hand, is left as-is.

You can try this feature out for yourself without having to download the font here. And if you’re curious about how this actually works and why certain words are blurred and not others, the company explains it on their website.

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