The NYT transgresses
As far as we can tell here at Language Log Plaza, the
New York Times broke new ground
yesterday, when it
printed
the word
shit in a quotation
from someone other than the President of the United States. Well,
piece-of-shit, but surely that
counts as an instance of the word
shit.
The expression occurs in "an anonymous, invective-laced phone message"
(audio available
here)
left for Bernard Spitzer, the father of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer;
the story begins on page 1, and eventually quotes some of the nasty
stuff:
In the message, the caller says,
referring to a potential subpoena:
"There is not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can
do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you.
You will be forced to tell the truth and the fact that your son's a
pathological liar will be known to all."
[But wait! Here's the
Times a month ago (7/22),
quoting Rudy Guiliani saying
bullshit, back in 1992: "A block away from City Hall, Mr. Giuliani gave a fiery address, twice calling Mr. Dinkins's proposal "bullshit." The crowd cheered. Mr. Giuliani was jubilant."]
For some time now, we've been tracking the
NYT's handling of taboo
vocabulary. The paper's policy is not to print dirty words, even
in quotations where they might be relevant, and also not to use
asterisking, "[expletive]", "the F word", or other standard avoidance
techniques, preferring instead to allude indirectly to the banned words
(or to omit the material entirely). However, over the years the
paper has relaxed its policy, allowing
shit when the President says it --
first, in 1974, from Richard Nixon (Abe Rosenthal at the time: "We'll
only take shit from the President"); then in 1976, attributed to a
fictionalized version of Lyndon Johnson; and, more recently, from
George W. Bush (details
here
and
here).
The paper has also had to relax its policy on avoidance, in order to
refer at all to book titles and the like (Harry Frankfurt's book
On Bull_ _ _ _).
But now the Presidential Shit Privilege has been relaxed. What
next?
[Addendum 8/25/07: Grant Barrett writes to report that the
NYT "City Room" blog of 8/23 has a
note from its standards editor about this latest four-letter word: "We rarely permit the use of profanity in our columns, even in quotations. We made a rare exception in this case because we felt that readers would more easily understand why the Spitzers were so upset about the message if they knew what the language was."]
Meanwhile, here are some examples of
NYT
shit-avoidance (of several
different styles) that we haven't previously blogged:
From Brett Reynolds, 11/21/06: in the "Science Times"
section
that day, "The Best Science Show on Television?":
'This is where we blow stuff up.' Jamie
Hyneman -- who, to be honest, did not actually use the word 'stuff' --
stood...'
Meghan O'Rourke,
review
of
Up Is Up But So Is Down,
Book Review of 11/19/06, p. 22:
... Most of the art may have been" --
insert four-letter word here -- "but it was a glorious time.
Elizabeth Weil,
Magazine story
"The Needle and the Damage Done", 2/11/07, p. 50:
One member described the execution
team's training by saying: "Training? We don't have training, realIy."
A nurse responsible for mixing the drugs, when asked how much she knew
about the anesthetic, said: "I don't study. I just do the job. I don't
want to know about it." Another team member dismissed mistakes by
saying that "[expletive] does happen."
On another taboo front, the
NYT
walked a fine line in a
review
of the show "Nigger Wetback Chink", 6/9/07: it quoted all three
of the ethnic slurs in comments from the actors, but gave the title as
"N*W*C*". (From Ben Zimmer, who got it from Grant Barrett.)
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at August 23, 2007 03:08 PM