Effing or fucking?
Yup, to boost LL readership, here's more on Mel Gibson and the "Fucking
Jews" tirade. Or should that be "f---ing" or "f***ing" or just a bleep
or what? A new one for me in
this
CNN clip: the reporter quotes Gibson (37 secs into the clip) by
uttering "effing," while on the screen we see "F*****g Jews",
and in the accompanying
article
we get "F---ing Jews." The reporter describes himself as giving a direct quote: "allegedly saying, quote, effing jews", but if other news sources are to be believed, Gibson certainly didn't say "effing," but "fucking." Presumably if CNN'd bleeped over the reporter, we'd have the impression that the reporter had himself used a bad word,
rather than "effing", which apparently is acceptable. I also like the
fact that on the clip "F*****g Jews" is visually superimposed on a torn
paper strip shape, delicately suggesting the veracity of a quote pulled
in direct from an on-the-spot reporter's notepad.
I wonder how the reporter would have quoted someone saying
"motherfucking"? Or for that matter how he would quote Mel's use in the
same eloquent improv passage of "sugar tits" to refer to a female
officer, a remark which for some reason hasn't been taken up by the
press as mysogynistic, and for which Gibson has not directly apologized. A schwa for the "i"? "Sugar mammary glands"?
Presumably with accompanying "t*ts" on-screen.
And BTW, was Jesus H. Fucking Christ the first Fucking Jew? I bet the
Egyptians has some pretty damned fruity locutions for Moses by the time
they got to plague 4 ("Arov", "flies" or some such), but history, alas,
does not record them. Perhaps in Mel's next carefully researched movie
we'll find out.
Full disclosure: I'm a fucking jew, but I don't have sugar tits.
Posted by David Beaver at August 2, 2006 11:06 AM