The Word In The Soup

I took way too much time out of my life on Sunday night trying to solve the mystery of the apparent forbidden word or words that I used in the entry that I was working on, the very entry that at the time, refused to save (even in private or as a draft). 

When I got that error message upon trying to post said entry, I was baffled. I had never gotten that error message before and I will be the first to admit that I’ve written some offensive and outlandish stuff before in many entries prior to Sunday.  I’m thinking that whatever I had written before, none of which had ever been flagged, had to be in some way, perfectly acceptable.  This past Sunday, I must have crossed some kind of invisible line. 

I say invisible because, as luck and I suppose the reality as Open Diary has deemed normal and acceptable, would have it, there is no formal list nor is it documented anywhere on the site what those inappropriate terms and/or phrases might be. So out came the figurative shovel and magnifying glass because I had to figure what in the hell this whole thing was.  It was a mystery for sure. 

I spent about two hours reading my entry repeatedly, looking for words and phrases that could have led to that error message popping up. After the first hour, I had just about given up. I nearly scrapped the entire entry with as frustrated as I had become.  The entry I was working on was not necessarily anything special or earth-shattering, but I worked hard on it and I wanted it to be posted. 

I found myself reading it over and over again, scrutinizing nearly every word, especially those that could have even remotely been considered objectionable.  Eventually, this would lead to some minor editing and when I still couldn’t find the discrepancy, I opted to complete some major edits, to where I damn near had to rewrite the whole thing. Even after some of that heavy editing and rewriting, I was nowhere closer to solving the mystery.

I had then decided that rather than keep trying to save the entire entry as a whole and continue to hope for the best, I would instead try to narrow it down a bit.  So, I broke the entry down and painstakingly saved each paragraph into a private entry, trying to pinpoint exactly in which paragraph the discrepancy may have been hiding.

This was the way to do it because eventually, I narrowed it down to the paragraph.  When I honed in on what I thought it was, I was still wrong.  I resorted to using synonyms for many of the words in that paragraph and after doing some rewrites and rewording things, I finally found it.       

I won’t spoil it just yet, but I guess I understood why this word is banned and otherwise considered to be inappropriate.  It’s not a word I would ever use, but I guess the sensors that be may have clearly thought differently.  Still, I wish there was some kind of list, maybe one which would specify what the apparent various inappropriate terms on Open Diary might be.

Maybe that’d be asking too much?