SFW vs NSFW

[jack]

Does "SFW" just mean "not NSFW", or does it mean "actively safe for work"? I guess, they are broad categories, but I'm not sure when to interpret SFW as "typical of the SFW category, eg. societally acceptable prose" and when to interpret it as "right up against the boundary of NSFW or I wouldn't have bothered to specify, but not over it" :)

Comments

[simont]

Yes, what cjwatson said, I think. Grice's maxim of quantity permits you to assume that if someone bothered to say "SFW" then there was some reason why you might have suspected otherwise, and that reason might be that it's actually close to the borderline, but then again it might also be that the content is totally unobjectionable and it's just that some piece of surrounding context (like the title or URL or just the forum in which it appeared) made it not look like a good bet.

(Perhaps even deliberately made it look suspicious, e.g. I have it on good authority that some people still think it's funny to put double entendres about 'pussy' in URLs which turn out to be cat pictures.)

[jack]

Ah, excellent observation. I think that ends up meaning, if someone says "SFW" and it looks nsfw, then it probably looks ok, but if it looks sfw, then it probably isn't :)