Don’t let my white-bread demeanor fool you; I’m a pretty hip guy. There are many things with which I can get jiggy. I have never spoken out against the Wu Tang Clan because I know that Wu Tang Clan “ain’t nuthin’ to f— wit.”

Since I’m so hip, I often enjoy listening to hip-hop. It’s a genre that features dope rhymes, fresh beats, and – especially for songs that get played on the radio – a lot of c———.

What is c———? Well, a word with nine dashes in a row can’t exactly be family friendly, although in this case, it is. You might have correctly guessed that “c———” is “censorship” (and by that, I mean you guessed that other, choice c-word, and then changed your mind after counting the letters).

In hip hop, censorship is based on the belief that some words are so taboo that hearing them fully exposed would rock your sheltered world to its core. The problem with this line of thinking is that inserting a few pauses here and there doesn’t exactly provide a cloak of invisibility. Human beings are whizzes when it comes to identifying words based on context, regardless of how many vowels and consonants have been obscured. I doubt anyone would interpret a particular bleeped-out verse as “I love it when the beaches soak my dock” or “Y’all naggers ain’t short.”

However, contextual information is sometimes lacking. The title of this column is a good example. By itself, it just doesn’t give you enough information to pick out the right “c-word.” It is only in similarly ambiguous situations that the censors are able to keep the dirty words in the dark. So, censorship can still work as long as we aren’t able to fill in the blanks. Problem solved, right?

I’m afraid not. If you don’t believe me, then you probably haven’t heard the radio version of Ludacris and Pharrell’s “Moneymaker,” which begins with Ludacris rapping, “You lookin’, you lookin’ good in dem jeans/I bet you’d look even better with me in .” When I first heard that verse, it struck me as an odd place to bleep out a word. There are lots of dirty words in the English language – and I’d say I’ve heard most of them – but after scanning through my mental lexicon of profanity, I couldn’t find one that would fit both the context and the rhyme scheme. It was only after I looked up the lyrics online that I found the shocking truth – “I bet you’d look even better with me in between.”

That’s what got bleeped? A bleeping preposition? OK, so maybe the context made it a little dirtier than normal, but the fact remains that by attempting to shield me from obscene language, the hip hop censors forced me to go over every dirty word I could think of. It seems that an ambiguous context may be one of the worst places to use censorship. All the bleeps and dashes in the world won’t make a difference as long as we’re able to read b—— the lines.