A story about Homo erectus, the evolutionary predecessor to modern man, crossing the open ocean, had the word "homo" — rather necessary to understanding the story — replaced by a series of asterisks. Here's a screenshot from Digg's RSS feed:

Understandable on Digg's part: Their audience probably has commenters who use "homo erectus" in the Urbandictionary.com sense. The site's human editors — wait, I thought they weren't supposed to have those! — have restored the word to the site manually. Too bad their algorithm has to be on guard for its use as an epithet.

(Photo of L'Homo Erectus via Belgiumgayclubs.com)

The campaign, created pro bono by the New York office of Arnold Worldwide, urges an end to using derogatory language, particularly labeling anything deemed negative or unpleasant as “so gay.” That is underlined by the theme of the campaign: “When you say, ‘That’s so gay,’ do you realize what you say? Knock it off.”

It's pretty amusing how any campaign targeted at teenagers brings declarations that "“Kids that age are tough and media savvy; they see through things quickly," and then they inevitably make the entire campaign a caricature of imaginary teen-dom. "Knock it off," really? And the campaign is specially teen-titled, "ThinkB4YouSpeak."

I just hope the use of "You" rather than "U" doesn't derail the whole effort. Regardless, let's hope this thing is successful. In this internet age, only idiots ridicule gay people. Repeat after me, teens: "You are such a microfamous narcissist." That's the ticket!