But by now the pendulum has swung to the other side. Frazier, who, not incidentally, studied Russian for his travels in Siberia, wrote a piece for a magazine produced by the Russian artist Alex Melamid, the Rubber Band Society Gazette, which was basically a page covered with obscenities. Remnick “said he liked it,” Frazier recalled, “and that emboldened me to do one for him.” Thus was born the Cursing Mommy, a sort of Heloise whose hints veer into rants with lines like “Somebody please tell me I have not lost my stupid goddam fucking drink.” She uses a vacuum cleaner called the SukMore. Thanks to the Cursing Mommy, Frazier was able to claim, “I’ve put more curse words on a single page of The New Yorker than anyone.”
My sense of what is truly profane—what is fun and what is journalism—has been untrustworthy since the Earl Sweatshirt incident. When Ben McGrath, writing about a soccer team in Brazil, used the phrase “bros before hos,” my first concern was the spelling of “hos.” I might have been distracted by the Portuguese—it is the only language I’ve ever studied that brought me to tears. I used the universal search to put the accent over the a in “S?o Paulo,” and insisted that for real, the Brazilian monetary unit, we use the Portuguese plural, reais. (In Portuguese, r is pronounced like h, and l like w, so real is pronounced hey-ow and reais is hey-ice.) That accent in ?o represents a nasalized diphthong that sounds like a prehistoric bird uncorking its love call. Mispronounced—and it is virtually impossible for foreigners to pronounce correctly (except certain prodigies from Flint, Michigan)—it will make you a laughingstock in the bakery: you think you’re asking for a loaf of bread (p?o) but are actually demanding wood (pao), which in Portuguese, as in English, is a variant on “dick.”
Anyway, in context, “bros before hos” referred to soccer players on a bus when one of them wanted time off to spend with his new girlfriend; in a display of “bros before hos” camaraderie, he was denied. The second reader on the piece circled “new girlfriend” and “hos” and wrote, “synonymous?” Well, of course they weren’t synonymous. I did not take the query seriously. I was still bent on making sure no one confused “hos” with “hoes,” the garden implement. It came up again in the closing meeting: “Is it really OK to print this?” the writer asked. I mentioned my colleague’s qualm—he is a jock, and he is married, and he wouldn’t want his wife to see herself dismissed as a ho. Still, I thought that in context it was clearly not serious—it was lighthearted, a reference to guys talking trash. So we left it in.
The piece was no sooner published than someone tweeted about The New Yorker’s first use of “bros before hos.” Of course. The contest now is more about being the first to get into print an obscenity that has not been used by anyone else. Then a story broke in the Brazilian press—something about a soccer team being compared with a whorehouse—and I realized that those soccer players and their wives and girlfriends would naturally be interested in what was being written about them and would ask someone to translate it for them. How would “bros before hos” come out in Portuguese? Would it be something like “players versus prostitutes”? Had we inadvertently compared a soccer team to a whorehouse? I spent a terrible day and night thinking about those players and their wives and girlfriends and how the women would be outraged at being called whores, and all the wives would boycott the sport and the controversy would reach the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, who is a woman, and it would become an international incident, with Brazil denying entry to American journalists. Brazil is a Catholic country, and although soccer is not above violence and vulgar insults (there was an anecdote in the piece about a player who had posed kissing another man, to show his support for gays; the fans called him a faggot at the next game), maybe it’s not so funny for a woman to casually be called a hooker. I had been careless. I never stopped to think how a bit of American slang would sound translated into Portuguese. Then again do you always have to stop and think how something is going to sound in Portuguese?