And yet in this climate it can be so fucking hard to keep your equilibrium. In the spring of 2012, The New Yorker ran a piece by Kelefa Sanneh about the rapper Earl Sweatshirt, whose mother sent him to reform school in Samoa because he had fallen in with bad companions. After reading the piece seven or eight times, making sure that “Shit sucks” and “OMG Fucking Just Ran From A Pack Of Fans Threw Coachella. Shit Was Wild!” and “LETS SWAG IT OUT” were rendered exactly as they were in the video or the tweet, I was so disoriented that I stetted a big-ass mistake at the end. What was the point of making a fuss over a “than” for a “then” in a piece so full of profanity, especially if that’s what the kid wrote? There should be a detox facility for proofreaders who have undergone this kind of extreme experience. I have never fully recovered my judgment and can no longer be trusted to distinguish a true, pithy utterance from a gratuitous four-letter word.
At the time, I did not know that there was an informal contest going on at the magazine to see which writer could get the most instances of “fuck” into print, and that Sanneh was going head to head with the editor of The New Yorker himself, David Remnick, for the title. You can’t write about rappers or about boxing without quoting a few obscenities, and if you are fluent in Russian, as Remnick is, you have a whole world of obscenities at your fingertips. In Russia there is an underground language called mat, loosely analogous to rap, in that it was first spoken on the street and in jail, and it puts Russophiles way out in front. As Remnick summarizes it, all of mat is based on four words: “there is khuy (‘cock’), pizda (‘cunt’), ebat’ (‘to fuck’), and blyad (‘whore’).” Victor Erofeyev went into startling lingustic detail in a New Yorker piece. “The term mat itself dervies from the Russian word for ‘mother,’ a component of the key phrase yob tveyu mat’ (‘fuck your mother’),” Erofeyev wrote. A flexible system of prefixes and suffixes makes it possible to twist and build the four words into an incredible variety of obscene shapes. Peter the Great, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Lermontov—all made use of khuy and ebat’. One of the milder expressions cited by Erofeyev, khuem grushi okolachivat—an equivalent of the beautiful Italian idiom dolce far niente—translates as “knocking pears out of a tree with one’s dick.”
It is as if The New Yorker had developed a raging case of Tourette’s syndrome since the days when Pauline Kael fought constantly with William Shawn to get the word “shit” into print. Kael was on leave in the late summer of 1979, when Apocalypse Now came out, and Mr. Shawn let Veronica Geng, who was filling in as movie critic, quote the opening lines: “Saigon. Shit.” Kael had missed her opportunity. Years earlier, Calvin Trillin, covering the desegregation of schools in the South, had determined to resign in protest if Shawn did not agree to print the exact words spoken by Lester Maddox, the governor of Georgia: “The federal government could take its education money and ‘ram it.’ ” Shawn ultimately agreed that the specific words were germane to the story. Robert Gottlieb carried on the conservative tradition when he decided not to let John McPhee quote sailors saying what sailors actually say in a report about a merchant marine. McPhee got his satisfaction years later in a piece about editors when he simply turned on the tap and filled a paragraph with “fuck”s.
The generation of writers who were hired by Shawn in the mid-seventies to write for Talk of the Town were often puzzled by some of his prohibitions. In addition to the usual bodily fluids—piss, shit, blood, and spit—he was squeamish about fish hooks, wigs, twins, and midgets. Mark Singer once had a reference to Ex-Lax removed from a story about the dirty-tricks campaign for state senator of Roy Goodman, whose family money came from Ex-Lax. And in a story tabulating the cost of taking the subway to a movie and buying refreshments, the editors cut Junior Mints. When Singer asked why, the style editor, Hobie Weekes, told him, “A New Yorker writer should not be eating Junior Mints.” According to Ian Frazier, the sentence incorporating as many Shawn taboos as possible was “The short, balding man wearing a wig took his menstruating wife to a boxing match.”