Language Log

On NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday today, Scott Simon interviewed Joe Eszterhas (famed as having been "one of the dirtiest, drinkingest writers in Hollywood"), on the occasion of the publication of his book Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith.  Early in the interview there was the following exchange:

Simon: … at some point you thought that maybe throat cancer was some kind of divine punishment for the things you said over the years.

Eszterhas: Well, I always had such a big, nasty, and usually obscene mouth that I would scatter with various F-bombs and other forms of tough expressions. And when this happened I thought, "you really are paying the price for all those years of firing that kind of stuff at people". I don't think that now.

A little while back, I noted that postcards with FUCK on them were coming to me through the mail with no interference. I added that

for some time now I've been noticing bumper stickers (locally) with FUCK and SHIT on them (FUCK BUSH, rather than the Spoonerized BUCK FUSH, for example), so apparently you can display taboo vocabulary in public (in certain places) without getting in trouble with the law.

That was badly phrased; something like "without getting in trouble with authorities" would have been better.

My friend Max Vasilatos, with whom I exchange mail every day (it's a long story), recently started sending me postcards in a series featuring signs in which a word has been replaced by FUCK or FUCKING — for instance,

YOU NEED SPACE
WE NEED TENANT
LET'S FUCK

(with TALK replaced by FUCK). And my favorite so far:

FUCKING IN REAR

(with PARKING replaced by FUCKING).

Nothing especially notable about the cards. Except that Max has been sending these as postcards, not put inside an envelope, and the USPO seems to have no problem with this display of taboo vocabulary. (Max does put cards of naked pornstars in envelopes.)

I haven't inquired about this with the USPO — no point in calling attention to it — and it might just be a local thing (Max is in San Francisco, I'm in Palo Alto, and this is a pretty tolerant part of the world). But for some time now I've been noticing bumper stickers (locally) with FUCK and SHIT on them (FUCK BUSH, rather than the Spoonerized BUCK FUSH, for example), so apparently you can display taboo vocabulary in public (in certain places) without getting in trouble with the law.

According to Matthew Moore in the Daily Telegraph:

Google searches turn up 3,810 results for "clbuttic", 5,120 for "consbreastution", and 1,450 for "Buttociated Press".

Well, Language Log readers who had already read about the athletic feats of Olympic star Tyson Homosexual will immediately recognize the clbuttic symptoms, and will know what has gone on here. Surely, I was moved to think (but see the update below), surely someone who is being paid for writing filtering software should be able to distinguish instances of ass preceded and followed by other letters from instances flanked by non-letters such as spaces or punctuation. Not to get too nerdy about it, but for those acquainted with Unix editors like vi or sed, shouldn't a programmer know the difference between the s/ass/butt/g command (wrong) and the perhaps slightly more reasonable s/\([^a-z]\)ass\([^a-z]\)/\1butt\2/g instruction? This much was within the competence of even rank beginners by the sixth week of the linguistically-based freshman course on Unix that I used to teach at UC Santa Cruz.

Yet Moore mentions sites on which you can see discussions of embbutties dealing with pbuttport holders and even unconsbreastutional laws pbutted by a Congress butterting powers to buttbuttinate foreign leaders.

We're been writing about taboo avoidance here on Language Log for years. It's an arena in which Faithfulness (reproducing an original faithfully) conflicts with a type of Well-Formedness (cleaving to some rule about what is "right", "correct", "appropriate", etc.). I've posted many times about such conflicts on Language Log (a list, probably incomplete, of my postings about Faith vs. WF can be found at the end of this posting) and will do so again. I mention it here only as a way of connecting taboo avoidance (and, for that matter, taboo use) to larger linguistic issues.

People send me potentially interesting examples all the time; I have many dozens of examples still not blogged on. Today I'm picking just three relatively recent cases, because they tickled me in one way or another.

If you're watching track and field events in the coming Olympics, keep an eye out for British runner Christine Ohuruogu, competing in the women's 400m race (she's currently the World Champion in the event). In 2005, Ohuruogu graduated with a degree in linguistics from University College London, and her thesis was all about taboo vocabulary, a popular topic on Language Log.

Letter to the editor in the July/August STANFORD magazine (from alumnus Bill O'Beirne '56), p. 6:

I am sorry to see STANFORD beginning the slide into the lowest-denomination morass of the common press and television. I do not appreciate the publication of Brian Inouye's article with the expletive undeleted. Sad to see the previously well-done magazine choosing to go down the tubes.

Here's the offending expletive in context, from senior Inouye's "Student Voice" column (May/June issue, p. 38, available on-line here) about being a B student in a demanding premed program:

Recently, over a beer-drenched table, some fraternity brothers and I discussed a biology exam. One guy was complaining about his A-minus after he had studied "so hard" for the test. Another was stressing out that he wouldn't get into med school because of his B-plus. When I tried to get some sympathy for my B, these two just scoffed, signified I had no hope, and returned to their whining. That's the problem with premeds: they make you feel like shit when you already feel like crap.

A little while back, there was a small media flap about the marking of the UK's GCSE (General Certification of Secondary Education) English exam back in 2006. The issue was an obscenity given as a response to one question, which nevertheless received a couple of marks. Controversy ensued. 

The news stories had to cope with reporting the obscenity, and that's of interest to us here at Language Log Plaza. In addition, the examiner compared the inappropriateness of the obscenity to the inappropriateness of using to preposition to with the adjective different — and such judgments on usage are another perennial topic here on Language Log.

A column in the Sunday New York Times from the newspaper's public editor Clark Hoyt is essential reading for anyone concerned with modern journalistic practices of taboo avoidance. Running under the headline "When to Quote Those Potty Mouths," the piece takes its cue from the Rev. Jesse Jackson's notorious comments about Sen. Barack Obama, recently caught on tape by Fox News. (See Mark Liberman's post "Political castration" for more on the incident.) The Times coverage didn't reveal what Jackson said exactly (and the Washington Post got away with saying that Jackson "wanted to castrate" Obama), but Hoyt pulls no punches:

For those curious about Jackson’s exact words — “I want to cut his nuts off” — The Post’s Web site provided a video link. The Times did not. (The Times agreed to an exception to its decision for this column because what he said is central to this discussion.)

The exception made by the Times editors was evidently good for one obscenity only, since Hoyt spends the rest of the column dancing around what the paper has and has not printed. Below I've provided a guide to the linguistic taboos Hoyt was forced to avoid, with relevant Language Log links.

When it comes to taboo mystification, sometimes the New York Times is just too damn coy. Last November, the name of the punk band "Fucked Up" ended up rendered in a Times concert review as a string of eight asterisks, with some oblique talk about how the name wasn't fit to print in the Times, "unless an American president, or someone similar, says it by mistake." And here they go again: in a July 3 review of a concert by rapper 50 Cent and his crew G-Unit, critic Jon Caramanica writes:

One of the few bright spots in the later part of the show was the belligerent 2002 single with the unprintable title about fake gangsters that saved 50 Cent from becoming just a mixtape-slinging obscurity.

Where might we find out the mysterious title of 50 Cent's "belligerent 2002 single"? Well, one place to look is the Times' own coverage of the rapper.

The latest issue of the New Yorker (July 7 & 14) has a Roz Chast cartoon (p. 75), "seven words you can't say in a cartoon", that's a tribute to the late George Carlin and his famous "Filthy Words" routine, "seven words you can't say on television". All the "words" are strings of obscenicons (credit to Ben Zimmer for the coinage, an alternative to the blander cursing characters), those punctuation marks, stars, spirals, and the like that are used to compose representations of cursewords in cartoons. (We've posted here many times on obscenicons.)

A friend of mine recently noticed a sign in a washroom saying

and wondered for a few moments just how many people had ever wrenched one of the sturdy hot-air hand-drying machines off the wall and hurled it into a toilet bowl in a fit of rage — before realizing that "hand dryers" was merely an unaccountably weird lexical replacement for "paper towels". Is "towel" a dirty word now? What on earth gets into some people when they are told to write a sign that addresses the public?

This one is beyond me (Stuart Elliott, "Speaking Profanglish",NYT 5/16/2008):

People who attended the Univision presentation were buzzing about a closing remark made by Joe Uva, chief executive at Univision Communications. He wrapped up the event with a jocular, four-word question that ended with the phrase “Are you in?”

The first word of the question was a colloquial expression familiar to Puerto Ricans, which Spanish speakers at the presentation likened to the word bomb unleashed this week on WNBC-TV by the anchor Sue Simmons.

The remark by Mr. Uva was greeted with nervous laughter from the audience members, either because they did not understand what he said — or because they did.

I can guess a few Spanish words that the NYT would view as unfit to print, but none of those that come to mind would fit in the frame "__ are you in?"