Why wouldn’t they?
Huh. Thanks.
The OP:
The title of the thread was the NY Times crosses a line. Not Trump. And that they used the full word. I got the impression that the OP was angry that the newspapers didn’t censor his words. Crossing a line usually means doing something that’s unacceptable, or not appropriate.
If my impression was wrong, I apologize.
Interestingly, the word “nigger” was an addition by the Times itself, rather than a quote (although it appears in quotes). Omarosa said she never heard Trump use it herself, and in her quotes she refers to it as the “N-word.” They not only didn’t hint at the word themselves, they explicitly used the word Omarosa was hinting at.
No, crossing a line doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong, just that it goes beyond what has previously been considered appropriate. (For example, Star Trek crossed a line on broadcast TV by showing an interracial kiss between Kirk and Uhura. Crossing that line was a good thing.) The OP actually didn’t express an opinion about his personal feelings about this. Perhaps he does feel that this represents the decline of Western Civilization, but he hasn’t said so.
I’m old enough to remember a time when even some dictionaries didn’t include “fuck.” (When I was in grade school it was very daring to look up dirty words in the dictionary. We were often disappointed.)
It used to be that prominent Americans weren’t used to being quoted verbatim, particularly if there were curse words involved. When I was posted in Lisbon, a new politically appointed ambassador arrived with her rich husband and bratty child in tow. The husband engaged in conversation with a member of the press at a cocktail party, not realizing that “off the record” really isn’t a concept in Europe.
The reporter asked him what he did, since he didn’t have an official job. The schmuck replied: “Well, I have a small office in the embassy, and the rest of the time I just fuck the ambassador.” It was quoted verbatim in the local Lisbon paper, much to everyone’s amusement.
Almost everyone’s.
This. I was surprised, that’s all. As I said, the Montreal Gazette quoted, “I’m f**ked.” As I said, the New Yorker has been using “fuck” for decades.
My 80 year old etymological dictionary has two entries fk and ct for each of which it comments, “One of two SE [standard English] words that cannot appear in print anywhere in the English speaking world.” This illustrates how much the world has changed in 80 years. I am mildly curious if there are any expletives that have replaced them, now that they are tame enough to appear in the newspaper of record. What do you do when you really have to be profane?
Trump?
Ok, maybe not quite yet, but soon!
You don’t listen to much rap, I take it.
The word appears in quotes because that’s standard practice when you are talking about the word rather than using it.
And Biden once whispered a phrase including the big bad F word into his ear, not knowing his mike was on. :o We were discussing that the next day at a meetup, and I replied that had he done this a few weeks earlier, he would have had to deal with his mother, who had just died.
Kate Winslet flipped someone the old bird in “Titanic.” I have since learned that yes, it did mean that back then.
The infamous child serial killer Albert Fish was also quoted as using that word in a police interview.
From etymonline, “fuck” didn’t appear in any English dictionary between 1795 and 1965, including the OED. It was actually outlawed to be used in print in the UK (1857) and US (1873). As the article says, the barriers began to be broken down in novels in Ulysses (1933) and Lady Chatterley’s Love (1959). By the late 1960s it was no longer daring in adult literature. However, in 1969 Jefferson Airplane could sing “fuck” and “motherfucker” on We Can Be Together, but substituted “fred” for both words in the lyrics in the liner notes.
I find that delightfully paradoxical, if the entries are actually “fuck” and “cunt” and not “fk" and "ct.”
My understanding is that Hari is saying they appear with the asterisks.
I just checked my Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary (Unabridged), published in 1979, and to my surprise it lacks fuck, cunt, and even shit. The definition for “crap” only includes the meanings for the dice game crap and a kind of buckwheat.
That’s around the time when one of my high school English teachers told us to never use a dictionary that doesn’t include “those words”, because they are a part of the language, like it or not.