Jesse Sheidlower makes a point near and dear to my heart today: it’s time to get rid of the dashes. You know the ones: f—, n—–, s—, etc. This is not a plea for reporters to write like Hunter S. Thompson, it’s a plea to fully report the obscenities uttered by famous people that our news organizations are too delicate to report:
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.
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.
When a public figure uses an obscenity, it’s news. Readers deserve to know exactly what was said. Consider my favorite obscene quote of all time, courtesy of Richard Mottram, a British civil servant:
We’re all fucked. I’m fucked. You’re fucked. The whole department is fucked. It’s the biggest cock-up ever. We’re all completely fucked.
You just don’t get the flavor if you don’t spell out the words. And in the US, we often don’t even get the quote with the dashes. As Sheidlower says, we get “a vulgarity” or “a long string of obscenities” or something similar, making us feel like everyone else knows what happened and we’re being deliberately left out. It’s long past time to knock this off. News outlets should print the news, full stop. If an obscenity is part of it, accuracy and integrity are more important than delicate sensibilities.
