My latest contribution to Language Log: an email to Arnold Zwicky instigating the post "No fuckin’ winking at the Times."
Basically I found it absurd that the prudish Gray Lady had written an entire article about the word fuck without even going so far as to call it "the f-bomb." Instead, the author called it "a word-bomb." He explains:
…very rarely does the paper print those obvious, winking, letter-word stand-ins. As The Times’s two-page stylebook entry on obscenity says, "An article should not seem to be saying, ‘Look, I want to use this word but they won’t let me.’ "
Looks like he failed on that one.
[The funniest part of the article is the correction:
An article last Sunday about shifting standards for the use of profanity misspelled the surname of the bartender in the television series "The Simpsons." He is Moe Szyslak, not Syzlak."
Reminds me of a correction I cut out of the Brown Daily Herald once. It said that they had misspelled the name of Xena the Warrior Princess as Zena, tacking on, solemnly: "We regret the error."]
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