Apple has tried to limit the naughty words and numbers that you can engrave onto AirTags. But could the tech giant possibly have overlooked a word or two?
Apple may be a trendsetting trailblazer when it comes to tech, but the mysteries of human sexuality remain well out of bounds for the Cupertino prudes. That’s presumably why any off-colour words are banned from being etched on to AirTags, even though the neat devices only allow four characters to be engraved in the first place.
Given this stringent limit however, and the boundlessly filthy minds of the writers at Recombu, which words, letters or phrases have been able to seep through the crack? (And no, that’s not a euphemism…)
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On Apple’s website, requested engravings are rendered in pleasingly large capital letters on the device, which just adds to the thrill when you find a word that the moralist nerds in California didn’t notice.
After playing around with the possibilities, I can confirm that coprophiles will be content that you can engrave BUM and FART on your location-tracking tool (although ARSE is firmly out of bounds).
The usual F and C words are predictably banned (well, FORNICATION was too long to fit in anyway), but a few sexual references can pass by the censorship board, including a certain diminutive form of Richard. If that doesn’t suffice, then both DONG and another common Chinese surname that means the same thing in this country are both acceptable alternatives. Should you be Victorian in your slang but not in your morals, you’ll be pleased to know that QUIM is open for you.
With numbers, anything goes: 420 and 69 are both allowed without a whisper of complaint. Best of all, Anglo-centric Apple has clearly overlooked foreign vocabularies from its Big Book of Bad Words, so you’ll find that CUL and CULO are tolerable terms for your tush, and let’s just say BITE means something very different in French than in English.
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But the real issue is this: if I choose to spend £29 ($29) on a little glorified keyring, I want to write whatever I want to write on it. And if it gives me a little chuckle to see a naughty word, so be it; the poe-faced puritans can go to HELL (a place name that it is permissible to have on AirTags too).
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