"‘You have to have some stuff to do,’ she said (she didn’t say ‘stuff’)"

March 5, 2015 2:44 AM

Fit to Print documents the ways in which the New York Times writes around expletives even as it is often drawn to the very words it deems unprintable.
posted by Elementary Penguin (15 comments total)

With twenty-five pages thus far? Makes me want to display bursts of a vocabulary I shouldn't possess, albeit in a celebratory fashion.
posted by mr. digits at 3:14 AM on March 5, 2015

Malcolm Tucker on Bowdlerisation

(language NSFW, as if that needs to be said)
posted by Omission at 3:42 AM on March 5, 2015

#$^#*^* just say, ^*#%@#
posted by sammyo at 3:46 AM on March 5, 2015

I always find it refreshing to read UK newspapers and see the same quotes uncensored. It's frustrating that US publications are so timid.
posted by octothorpe at 4:09 AM on March 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

Some of these circumlocutions are mildly amusing, but some are just fucking awful.
posted by graymouser at 4:17 AM on March 5, 2015

>It's frustrating that US publications are so timid.

Puritans gonna ... Puritate.
posted by kcds at 4:17 AM on March 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

#$^#*^* just say, ^*#%@#

These are just regular expressions.
posted by srboisvert at 4:33 AM on March 5, 2015 [8 favorites]

On the bright side, this will give amusement to readers for generations to come, much as 21st -century readers chuckle at Victorian characters in a state of high emotion uttering, "G__ d___ you, sir!"

Deadwood it is not.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:46 AM on March 5, 2015 [4 favorites]

One of my personal frustrations with yankee cultural imperialism, this moronic desire to avoid all curse words in what are supposedly adult media.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:16 AM on March 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

I've seen posters do it on Metafilter, of all places.
posted by indubitable at 5:23 AM on March 5, 2015

Rock Steady loves this, including an unprintable modifier for emphasis.

My teenage daughter and her friend have this thing where instead of swearing, they say the first letter of the word and add "-aboo" or "-afoo" to it. So faboo (fuck), bafoo (bitch), shaboo (shit), daboo (damn), aboo (ass), tafoo (which I guess is tits? but they use it as more of a general noun, like shit). It's pretty adorable.
posted by Rock Steady at 5:58 AM on March 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

Minced oaths are a useful habit to develop before you have a kid. Josie Penguin told me the other day that her preschool teachers told her it's okay to say, "What the heck?!" (which she says CONSTANTLY), but that maybe she shouldn't scream it in public.

she also got in trouble for teaching all her friends to call each other "Buttcheeks" #bestdadever
posted by Elementary Penguin at 6:04 AM on March 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

Fuck the heck?
posted by Rock Steady at 6:31 AM on March 5, 2015

There's always the irreproachable approach, e.g. "Oh, intercourse the penguin!", "What an auto-erotist."
posted by George_Spiggott at 7:10 AM on March 5, 2015

I was once given the job of going through the source code and the issue tracking database and removing any "bad" language before they were both turned over to the client at the end of the project. So now every time I type swear words in something I'm being payed for, I think about having to go un-type it later and decide to just delete it right now.
posted by benito.strauss at 9:22 AM on March 5, 2015