Sports often raise such dilemmas, where you have to choose between reporting a crude thing someone said and reflecting that maybe this isn’t actually news. It turned out that what had excited comment in Brazil was not the “bros before hos” line but something a Brazilian had actually said in the piece—a direct quotation, in English, in which the vice-president of a soccer team compared running the team to being in charge of a whorehouse, and loving it. Because it was in a quotation, it did not occur to me to query it, even though I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading. So I stopped worrying about having caused an international incident. “Bros before hos” produced a letter from an irate reader in Milwaukee, who thought the usage demonstrated casual misogyny and made me realize that my job had been to support the writer, who had expressed doubt about using the phrase. Mea culpa.
In another demonstration of impaired judgment, I read a piece in which an executive in charge of an important group recalled saying to his critics, “Fuck you!” I thought, That’s harsh. But I didn’t suggest changing it. The reporter was scrupulous, and the executive had been quoted accurately. I had a chance to query it again on the second round—a second chance to have second thoughts. But again I told myself that this executive obviously didn’t care what anyone thought. When I read the piece one last time, the “Fuck you” was gone. At the closing meeting, the editor made some reference to ultimately deciding to take the profanity out. Had I again shown a lapse in judgment by not querying a profanity? And if I hadn’t queried it, who had? And did whoever queried it think I was not doing my job? Had the writer and the editor just been waiting for me to take it out? Was I like a parent who should be setting limits? I found myself relieved once it was gone, and that relief, more than anything else, made me realize that I should have queried it.
I followed up on this incident with the editor and found out that it was the executive who objected to being quoted saying something so forceful, so bridge-burning and provocative—and in the boardroom, no less. The editor described himself as “merciless,” inclined always to go ahead with the verbatim quotation and let the subject live with it: “If you said it, you said it—you can’t take it back now.” But the executive explained that he had been paraphrasing himself. This one instance of the word’s being withheld was more instructive than all the times the word was printed. It showed that it still had force.
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Every once in a while, the power of the euphemism asserts itself. “Euphemism” is another word with Greek roots: eu, good (as in “eugenics,” good genes, or “utopia,” good place, as spelled by Thomas More), and pheme, something spoken. It means a sugarcoating. “Fiddlesticks” is Scarlett O’Hara’s way of saying “Fuck this shit.” “Phooey” might be Shirley Temple’s preference. “Jee-pers” and “Jiminy Cricket” are variations on “Jesus” and “Jesus Christ.” I have spent whole hangover days laughing at the idea of a law firm with letterhead stationery printed “Johnson, Johnson, Johnson & Johnson.” I don’t know why it took me so long to find the name of the Band-Aid and baby-shampoo company in my college town funny: New Brunswick’s own Johnson & Johnson. I am sure that Samuel Johnson, the father of lexicography, would get a kick out of knowing that his surname was synonymous with penis. One day, in the course of my mundane working life, I read the words “Robert Caro writes in the most recent volume of his Johnson biography . . .” and cracked up. I know that Caro is writing the definitive biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, but in the privacy of my office I permitted myself to picture Robert Caro as a square-looking guy who had yet led a life of such sexual adventurism that he needed to write a multivolume biography of his Johnson.
I’m not sure how much further we can take profanity and still enjoy it. The lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower edited The F-Word, a 270-page alphabetized collection of variations on this versatile oath. My colleagues and I have argued in the office over whether it should be rendered F-word, F word, “F” word, or “f” word, but who really gives a fuck about the proper form of a euphemism? It is an odd thing to strive to be consistent about. Downstairs at the Strand, New York’s legendary used-book store, in the section on language, various editions of Sheidlower’s lexicon take up a few feet on the miles of shelves. My own copy is a late edition, a sleek red hardcover, but when The F-Word first came out, in 1995, it was packaged as if wrapped in plain brown paper, like pornography. The F-Word is a little bit like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: a dictionary, like a museum exhibit, is bound to deprive the thing it enshrines of the raw quality that gave it its vitality in the first place.
You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words. And yet no one wants to be pummeled constantly by four-letter words. If we are going to use them, let’s use them right. Profanity ought to be fun. I love the title of this chapter and thought I should spell out those words uncensored—swag it out! But I like it even better with the blessed euphemism: the asterisks standing in for the vowels are interior punctuation, little fireworks inside the words.
Chapter 10