How Should We Put This?

Over on News Desk, my colleague Blake Eskin takes the New York Times to task for its conservative language policy, which this week led the writer Noam Cohen to resort to some interesting prose gymnastics in an article about Cee Lo’s new viral sensation, “Fuck You.” Eskin writes:

Times reporters’ ingenuity in curse avoidance is usually guaranteed to bring almost as big a smile to my morning commute as their contortions in describing a source’s reasons for requesting anonymity. But I got much more pleasure from Cee Lo’s exuberantly profane song than from Cohen’s playfully indirect disquisition on it.

A few weeks ago, when I posted an interview with Andrew Gottlieb, author of the Elizabeth Gilbert parody “Drink, Play, F@#k,” I noticed that Black Cat Press had opted to “bleep out” the final word of the title on the book’s cover, and in all subsequent mentions. (That “f@#k” is spelled out in condoms on the cover shows that there was a limit to the publisher’s high-mindedness.) With all these euphemisms running wild, it might be worth looking at how some other publishers have chosen to deal with the offending word.