Thanks to a thread on the Sun Java Forums I discovered the joy of a new word coined in the white heat of badly constructed software. The word is clbuttic and it's what happens when an excessively prim automated censor has absolutely no sense of context. In America, you see, "ass" is a naughty word. But me no butts.

Of course as soon as I found out about this the inevitable reaction was to see how many equivalents I could find. Once I'd discovered a few, I had to call in my fellow researcher Ian just so I could accuse him of being a buttembly language programmer.

Between us we discovered the secrets of the U.N. General Buttembly and other such hbuttles. Personally I'm concerned by the existence of mbutt hypnotists almost as much as the notions of holy mbutt and clbutt war.

The idea of buttisted suicide is fairly alarming, but not perhaps so much as the observation that China buttails Australia.

I think that buttume sounds kind of cancerous, but Ian thinks it's probably some sort of unpleasant perfume. Either way I think I'll decline to sample the cbutterole.

Other "found" phrases include:

• "You know what they say about buttuming?" [Er... no, actually...]
• "When you buttume you make an BUTT out of U and ME" [Ahhh!]
• "Disbuttembly of the proprietary OS is buttumed legal here" [But possibly not in Texas]
• "My unbuttisted birthing positions"

It has not been a productive evening.