LabRat wrote:
I remember, years ago when I was first reading stories on the Archive I'd notice that they used that method often to get around people using the word 'god'. It would be G_d or something similar. And I could never understand what the difference was between that and just plain 'god' itself.
There's no way for me to know if this is the reason, but in the Orthodox Jewish faith people don't write out "God" because it's the name of the most holy being, so they substitute "G_d" to keep from writing out His title or His Name. Even people of Jewish heritage who become Christians often retain this convention.
And I recall a terse conversation I had with my high school English teacher (who was universally disliked due to her poor attitude towards her students) summarily informed me that the name of a specific deity had to be capitalized. I didn't mind the information, but I did mind being given this piece of data along with a good deal of disdainful condescension.
I don't use profanity in my stories. I even discovered while writing one of my earlier stories that a certain five-letter word referring to one's posterior doesn't mean that in some English-speaking countries. I have learned to delete that word from my L&C writing to prevent unnecessarily offending people. To throw in my two cents' worth, I agree with the non-rude word policy. I understand that others don't, and that's okay. We're all individuals who belong to a community, and as such we need some standards just to keep order.
