Avoidance omnibus
This is an omnibus issue of Annals of Taboo Avoidance, with seven
items, going back to June 7th and forward to today.
1.
Back
in June, I mocked the
New York
Times for not letting a reporter use the French word
merde and pushing him into
ostentatious avoidance in describing
... the classic niçois version
of gnocchi (its name, even in French, cannot be printed here)...
At the time, I reported Mark Liberman's discovery that over the years
the
NYT had not in fact been
particularly shy about printing the word (in French); even William
Safire used it. But another discovery of Mark's got to me too
late for inclusion in my posting: since 1981, the paper had printed
"dog poop" (not a bad translation of the name of the gnocchi in
question) 17 times, so it would have been available as an alternative
to this baffling allusion to the name of the dish.
I've reported here that the
Times
has set itself a tough task in dealing with taboo vocabulary. On
the one hand, it absolutely insists that taboo words not be printed,
even in quotations where they would cast some light on the character or
emotional state of a speaker or writer -- though on occasion (most
recently,
in
July) it makes an exception for the President of the United
States.
On the other hand, it has a stated policy of not using ostentatious
avoidance: no "F-word", "F-bomb", "freaking", "expletive deleted",
"S---", or the like. In cases where someone at the paper (writer
or editor) thinks some allusion to the taboo word is called for, it
will stretch this second principle to allow things like "a word that
cannot be printed in this newspaper" or "a name that cannot be printed
in a family newspaper" (as above, with reference to the gnocchi).
But the paper's practice is inconsistent, no doubt because different
editors choose to perform this balancing act in different ways.
And so we get things like
"Bull,"
Dean snapped, using a slightly more elongated version of the term.
which
I
reported on a little while ago.
Now two more from the
Times
that slipped past during the summer.
2. On July 7th, an article by Kirk Johnson told about the
journal kept by Columbine High School killer Eric Harris, including the
report that
One entry taken from the Harris home
was simply called "Black." "I can't see a [expletive deleted]
thing," it said, "so what the hell am I gonna write about, how I can't
see anything? My mind is black, sight is black, everything is
black."
There's a fairly easy fix for this, something along the lines of:
One entry taken from the Harris home
was simply called "Black." In it the author says he can't see a
thing and asks "so what the hell am I gonna write about..."
Along similar lines, the gnocchi piece could simply have omitted any
reference to the name of the dish. And Dean could have been
reported as snapping an objection.
3. On July 23rd, guest "On Language" columnist Ashley Parker
wrote about word truncations in the lingo of some young women she
knows. At the conclusion, one of them (Parker's younger sister
Justine) deflects a maternal punishment:
"And it is the first time -- I prom. I prom, madre. So true. I'm sor. I'm really sor."
My mom let her go with just a warning. When Justine relayed the
whole story to me the next day, I gave the only appropriate response I
could think of: "She didn't punish you? What the freak-a-leak."
What the freak-a-leak indeed.
Matthew Hutson, who wrote me about this column, marveled at the way the
Times balked at "f-bomb" but
was willing to print "freak-a-leak" (twice, in fact). But Parker
wanted to illustrate that she had picked up a lot of her sister's lingo
herself, so it's hard to see how to write around the avoidance word
"freak".
4. Then from Eric Jusino came a pointer to an article in the
Boise State University
Arbiter
of July 26th, complaining about the extreme heat at the time, under the
headline
It's Fºn HOT
This is very ostentatious avoidance indeed (though Justino and I both
thought it was clever), and, not surprisingly, elicited an angry letter
(of August 21st) from a faculty member protesting the "abbreviated form
of the 'f-word'" in the paper:
Vulgar language (a.k.a. cursing,
profanity, obscenity) is unprofessional and should have no place in a
collegiate publication; the AP and UPA stylebooks will tell you as
much."
5. Next
an
AP story of October 6th ("Sienna Miller Apologizes to Pittsburgh"),
passed on to me by Edward Carney:
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- Sienna Miller, who
disparaged Pittsburgh in a magazine interview, apologized on Friday,
saying her remarks were taken out of context and that she found the
city and residents gracious.
The 24-year-old British actress, in
town shooting the screen adaptation of Michael Chabon's novel ''The
Mysteries of Pittsburgh,'' called the city a name that sounds like
Pittsburgh, but contains an expletive. Her comments appear in the
latest edition of Rolling Stone, which hit newsstands Friday.
Rolling Stone
quotes
"Shitsburgh" as is.
[Addendum, 10/10: Charles Belov points out that "a name that sounds like Pittsburgh, but contains an expletive" would be "Pissburgh"; "Shitsburgh is a name that
RHYMES with "Pittsburgh" and contains an expletive. Inept euphemizing!]
6. From
yesterday's
Observer Magazine -- the
Observer is the Sunday counterpart
to the
Guardian -- a jokey
taboo avoidance that echoes the Dean quotation above, pointed out
to me by Jasper Milvain:
"Someone shouted, out of a caravan, at
me. 'Where you trying to go, you deuced poltroon?' I have changed both
adjective and noun to protect my sources."
7. Finally, from Aaron Dinkin, a report of an interview on
Philadelphia NPR station WHYY this morning, in which the interviewer Q
(Marty Moss-Coane) and the interviewee A (John F. Harris) try to
negotiate what you can say on the air in the United States. The
exchange went:
A: "... they just don't give a ... uh ... darn -- I'm not sure what I
can say --"
Q: "'Darn' is okay."
A: "'Darn' is okay."
There's a question about whether "darn" is okay? What have we
come to?
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at October 9, 2006 02:28 PM