By Alex Luthi
ONLINE EDITOR

In March 2009 many news organizations began carrying a story about a South Pasadena, Calif. teenager who, bothered by the vulgar language of his peers, started a No Cussing Club at his junior high school in 2007.

The club’s Web site claimed to have started with 100 members at the teenager’s school but has quickly grown into a world phenomena with members from all 50 U.S. states and more than 20,000 members worldwide.

In addition to the media attention, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors have declared the county will observe a “No Cussing Week” to encourage citizens to clean up their language.

Despite interviews and television appearances claiming his club’s goals are benign, 14-year-old McKay Hatch, the student who conceived the No Cussing Club has been bullied, threatened and has even had prostitutes sent to his family’s home in what Hatch says are attempts to intimidate him to quit promoting his club.

Right around the same time as the No Cussing Club was making the rounds in the media, another story in a similar vein cropped up but this time centered in China.

As reported by the New York Times, Youtube videos and Internet postings of an online mythical beast called a grass-mud horse, said to be created exclusively to evade China’s Internet censors. These censors, who many times operate primarily on private Web sites attempt to clean up the Internet of any content deemed unseemly for it’s citizens by the country’s ruling party.

What makes the grass-mud horse interesting is the words “grass-mud horse” and a common but unprintable Chinese insult are homonyms, sounding very similar. Both “grass-mud horse” and “F*** your mother” are spelled differently but are pronounced “Cao ni ma,” with only differing tones helping to separate the meaning of the two phrases.

Grass-mud horses are said to be sworn enemies of the river crab, another play on words sounding similar to “harmony,” synonymous with censorship in Chinese Internet culture. Chinese bloggers and posters who have been censored online refer to being “harmonized,” alluding to President Hu Jintao’s calls for his country to create a harmonious society.

Although both the Chinese government and Hatch’s club say they want to clean up and improve society, each tries to reach that goal in very different ways. The No Cussing Club promotes what its members feel is a more proper and polite way to converse, while many Chinese Internet sites self-censor content they feel might be deemed “indecent” by their government.

Thanks to the United State’s first amendment, detractors to the No Cussing Club never have to worry about the club’s ideologies becoming law and can continue to swear and cuss to their hearts content.