Bonfire of the profanities
By William Safire
International Herald Tribune
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Today we are going to deal with the media coverage of profanities, expletives, vulgarisms, obscenities, execrations, and epithets, nouns often lumped together by the Bluenose Generation as coarseness, crudeness, bawdiness, scatology or swearing. But roundheeled readers should stop rubbing their hands because the deliberately shocking subject can be treated with decorum, in plain words, without the titillating examples of "dirty words."
If you want to fulminate about such prissiness about prurience in print, feel free to express your outrage with the typographical device to which cartoonists have resorted for generations: !#*&%@%!!!
The need for today's review is the coverage given to the participial modifier employed with great frequency and immortalized on recordings of telephone conversations made by the FBI as its shocked - shocked! - agents eavesdropped on Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor. His favorite intensifier was reproduced in many newspapers and Internet sites with dashes as "----ing" or with asterisks as "****ing" and was substituted in broadcasts and Netcasts as a word descriptive of the sound called bleep.
Here's how The Washington Post handled it (with italics mine): "The governor, whose alleged dishonesty was matched only by his profanity, was secretly recorded by federal investigators saying that the Senate seat is 'a (expletive) valuable thing, you don't just give it away for nothing.' (Prosecutor Patrick) Fitzgerald, in his news conference Tuesday, thoughtfully replaced each of the governor's obscenities with 'bleep' or 'bleeping."' But in trying not to use the same word twice, the writer used three words with related but different meanings and etymologies.
(More here.)
International Herald Tribune
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Today we are going to deal with the media coverage of profanities, expletives, vulgarisms, obscenities, execrations, and epithets, nouns often lumped together by the Bluenose Generation as coarseness, crudeness, bawdiness, scatology or swearing. But roundheeled readers should stop rubbing their hands because the deliberately shocking subject can be treated with decorum, in plain words, without the titillating examples of "dirty words."
If you want to fulminate about such prissiness about prurience in print, feel free to express your outrage with the typographical device to which cartoonists have resorted for generations: !#*&%@%!!!
The need for today's review is the coverage given to the participial modifier employed with great frequency and immortalized on recordings of telephone conversations made by the FBI as its shocked - shocked! - agents eavesdropped on Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor. His favorite intensifier was reproduced in many newspapers and Internet sites with dashes as "----ing" or with asterisks as "****ing" and was substituted in broadcasts and Netcasts as a word descriptive of the sound called bleep.
Here's how The Washington Post handled it (with italics mine): "The governor, whose alleged dishonesty was matched only by his profanity, was secretly recorded by federal investigators saying that the Senate seat is 'a (expletive) valuable thing, you don't just give it away for nothing.' (Prosecutor Patrick) Fitzgerald, in his news conference Tuesday, thoughtfully replaced each of the governor's obscenities with 'bleep' or 'bleeping."' But in trying not to use the same word twice, the writer used three words with related but different meanings and etymologies.
(More here.)
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