Another bullshit night in suck city
A little while back, Geoff Pullum ranted,
very briefly, about a National Public Radio talk show discussing Harry
Frankfurt's book Bullshit,
observing that
because of the goddamn Federal
Communications Commission, no one was
at any time during the hour permitted to mention the name or the topic
of the book.
Then there's self-editing. Back on
9/22/04, I reported to ADS-L on how the New York Times dealt with this
troublesome word. The short answer: not very well. Coyly,
in fact.
[I regularize the capitalization etc. of the original.]
The NYT Book Review of 9/19/04 (p. 18)
had to cope with the title of Nick Flynn's
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A
Memoir, and opted for two kinds of ellipsis:
Another Bull _ _ _ _ Night . . .
I didn't understand the second ellipsis, taking the ellipsis dots to be
part of the title. But a Google search showed me my error.
Vendela Vida's review begins by addressing the issue of the title:
It takes guts to give a book a title
that many publications, including this one, can't print in its
entirety. The title of Nick Flynn's book gives the (not wholly
inaccurate) impression that it's the memoir of a 20-something urbanite,
and no doubt it will lure a young -- and fortunate -- audience.
It
would be a shame, though, if potential readers dismissed the book
because of the title alone -- its source, by the way, is quite
unexpected -- because Flynn has written a potent,
distinctive autobiography.
Booksellers, book discussion groups, other book reviews, Wisconsin
Public Radio [but this was before the FCC's current campaign really got
going; maybe they used the word only on their website, though, and not
on the air -- isn't this absurd?], and many other sources just used the
damn title, without
apology.
The "unexpected" source of the title isn't particularly intriguing:
it's a phrase Flynn's father used. (Though Jon Lighter wryly
suggested: "Maybe unexpected to Vida because it sounds so, so, 21st
Century!!!!! Like, you know?")
"Another bullshit night" comes up in several blogs, with reference to
disappointing evenings. Google also nets a few occurrences of "Suck
City" (with reference to Flint MI and Atlanta GA, at least) that are
not references to a band of that
name. Both expressions in one package is (so far as my searches last
fall showed) restricted to Nick Flynn's book.
The NYT's refusal to use some form of
shit
in print is just barely understandable, though many other publications
didn't share its reluctance. What is so remarkable to me is that
it seems to consider
suck a
taboo word as well, even in contexts with no explicit reference to
fellatio. As far as I can tell, it's unique in this.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu