The Case for Profanity in Print

By JESSE SHEIDLOWER

LAST month, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland made some impolitic comments about the European Union during a phone call with the ambassador to Ukraine. The phone call was leaked, leading to an embarrassing diplomatic incident that was covered in multiple articles in the media. But what, exactly, did Ms. Nuland say?

Reuters and The Guardian printed her most notable comment in full. Most major news organizations, including The Washington Post, Time magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN and The Associated Press, reported the actual phrase Ms. Nuland used, but replaced some letters of the particularly offending word (which began with the letter F) with dashes or asterisks. The Los Angeles Times reported that Ms. Nuland used “a blunt expletive when expressing frustration.” And this newspaper stated that she had “profanely dismissed European efforts in Ukraine as weak and inadequate.”

Our society’s comfort level with offensive language and content has drastically shifted over the past few decades, but the stance of our news media has barely changed at all. Even when certain words are necessary to the understanding of a story, the media frequently resort to euphemisms or coy acrobatics that make stories read as if they were time capsules written decades ago, forcing us all into wink-wink-nudge-nudge territory. Even in this essay, I am unable to be clear about many of my examples.

Taste is a legitimate concern. But this isn’t a matter of sprinkling salty words around to spice up the content. These circumlocutions actually deprive readers of the very thing these institutions so grandly promise: news and information. At a time when readers can simply go online to find the details from more nimble upstarts willing to be frank, the mainstream media need to accurately report language that is central to their stories.

News organizations already have a precedent for this in their style guides. The Associated Press stylebook warns against the use of obscenities, but says they can be printed if there is a “compelling reason” to do so and if they are a part of direct quotations. The New York Times style guide states, “readers should not be left uninformed or baffled about the nature of a significant controversy.” But all too often readers are indeed left uninformed or baffled, because leeway is rarely granted. (A Tumblr called Fit to Print exists solely to establish “a catalog of expletive avoidance” from this newspaper.)

There have been numerous cases in recent years when the use of offensive language has been the news story itself. In 1998, Representative Dan Burton referred to President Clinton with an offensive word. In 2000, a microphone picked up George W. Bush using a vulgar term to describe the New York Times reporter Adam Clymer. In 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney insulted Senator Pat Leahy on the Senate floor with yet another vulgarity. In 2007, Isaiah Washington was kicked off the television show “Grey’s Anatomy” for referring to his fellow actor T. R. Knight with a gay slur. This January, Representative Michael Grimm threatened an aggressive reporter, using an obscenity.
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These stories were covered widely, but in most cases, the details were obscured. The relevant words were described variously as “an obscenity,” “a vulgarity,” “an antigay epithet”; replaced with rhyming substitutions; printed with some letters omitted; and, most absurdly, in The Washington Times (whose editor confessed this was “an attempt at a little humor”), alluded to as “a vulgar euphemism for a rectal aperture.” We learn from these stories that something important happened, but that it can’t actually be reported.

The cover story of the March issue of The Atlantic is a critical look at fraternities in which the author, Caitlin Flanagan, mentions “a particular variety of sexual torture reserved for hazing and best not described in the gentle pages of this magazine.” This jokey omission materially weakens the exact point she is making: that we should pay attention to what is going on inside fraternity houses. Scott Stossel, the magazine’s editor, acknowledged to me that “we probably should have included a description of the practice in question. The omission may well have frustrated readers.”

In other instances, the excised words are not the subject of reported news but are nonetheless integral to the story, as when artistic works have titles that can’t be printed by reviewers. Harry Frankfurt wrote a serious work of philosophy, published by Princeton University Press, which remained on the New York Times best-seller list for 27 weeks, despite a title containing what was once frequently euphemized as a “barnyard epithet”; the same word appeared in a widely praised memoir by the poet Nick Flynn. Several prominent plays have included a version or compound of the F-word in their titles, including Aaron Posner’s adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington; a monologue by Mike Daisey about Ayn Rand that ran at the Public Theater in New York; and a play by Stephen Adly Guirgis that ran on Broadway.

Refusing to print the titles of works deemed important enough to review seems to confound the claim of upholding standards. Last year, The Washington Post ran an article specifically addressing the use of the F-word in the arts, asking, if a word is used in the Senate, in the White House, in songs and in movies, “Can something so ubiquitous still qualify as scandalous?” However, The Washington Post has publicly struggled with the issue itself, publishing Mr. Cheney’s 2004 insult of Senator Leahy in full but altering other quotes, as noted in a 2011 column by its ombudsman in which he reported that a “war of words is being waged in the Post newsroom” over when to print profanities.

Terms that are insulting toward a particular group of people should be handled with sensitivity. But that doesn’t mean obscuring the issue. If the N.F.L. mulls a policy of penalizing players for using racial epithets, we should be able to read what these epithets are — not just sanitized versions like “the N-word.” Discussing a word is not the same as wantonly using a word, just as reporting on racism does not make you a racist. The recent Tampa Bay Times obituary for the former Florida governor Reubin Askew mentioned a 1958 campaign incident “in which a heckler hurled a common epithet of the times and called him a ‘n----- lover.’ ” Slate deemed this “censorship-by-dashes,” a sad choice for an episode in which Askew stood up to the heckler, turned his slur against him, and won his race.

When language can play such a hot-button role in our society, what we need is more reporting, not less. Some publications have loosened the restraints. The New Yorker has noticeably done so, British and Australian newspapers often print offensive words in full, and The Economist’s style guide reads: “if you do use swear words, spell them out in full, without asterisks or other coynesses.”

But at many institutions there have been only a few exceptions to the rule. The New York Times included an uncensored F-word when it quoted Monica Lewinsky in the Starr Report in 1998. The Lewinsky episode (and to a lesser extent, the Lorena Bobbitt case) brought “penis” into many newspapers. Coverage of the activist Russian punk band Pussy Riot has made a previously banned term common, at least in this compound usage — in a triumph for the group, which reportedly chose its name specifically to challenge the conventions of American media.

In 1934, in the journal “American Speech,” the scholar Allen Walker Read published “An Obscenity Symbol,” still the most important article written about the F-word. Over the course of 14 pages, he explored the word’s etymology, its history in dictionaries and, at some length, the nature of taboo itself, writing that “no sensible person would maintain that sex in itself is obscene, for it can be a wholesome, ennobling force.” Mr. Read criticized the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, referring to “the lasting shame” of their omission of this and other taboo terms. Yet in this serious essay, which appeared in an academic journal published by a well-established scholarly society, he did not once use, or even quote, the word in question. Mr. Read was writing 80 years ago. It’s time to print exactly what we mean.

Jesse Sheidlower is a lexicographer, the president of the American Dialect Society and the author of “The F-Word.”