How the #%!*# do I write a column about words that don’t belong in a family newspaper?
Maybe by starting with a warning: The following column contains language some people may find offensive. Parents should exercise discretion.
Next, perhaps, I should refer to a letter to the editor that appeared last Sunday. In it reader Martha Wiley of Spokane took exception to two recent examples of what she considers unacceptable vocabulary in a newspaper.
One was a front-page headline on March 14 over a story about the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service:
“INS catches hell for terrorist visas”
The second concern involved a March 11 story quoting a Gonzaga University fan as being “pissed” over the Bulldogs’ seeding in the NCAA basketball tournament.
I’m sure it wasn’t the first time Wiley has seen such words in The Spokesman-Review. In the nearly eight years that the paper has been stored in an electronic archive the word “pissed” had appeared in 21 earlier articles. “Hell” had appeared more times than the search engine was willing to count, although frequently in a religious context, which Wiley considers allowable. (One story, for instance, was about a judge who told two young defendants they would go to hell if they lied in court.)Society has grown accustomed to hearing these and stronger words — on television and in movies, not to mention numerous public places where they once would not have been uttered but Wiley’s letter suggested that a newspaper should keep the bar higher.
“Although coarse and unimaginative language has become acceptable in conversation, society holds the written, published language to a higher standard,” she wrote.
Like most newspapers, The Spokesman-Review has a set of guidelines that govern whether and when to use profanity and obscenity. However, a quick check of the archives shows we ignore those guidelines fairly regularly or interpret them loosely.
Basically, the rule is this: Don’t use extraneous profanity or obscenity, even in quotes, unless it is essential to the understanding of the story.
One such exception would be the episode a year and a half ago when President Bush was standing too close to an open mike when he called a New York Times reporter a “major league asshole.”
Generally, though, when sources speak in questionable terms, reporters and editors are expected to paraphrase or to convey the meaning indirectly.
When exceptions are made, they are to be approved by a managing editor. To assist copy editors in knowing when to seek that approval, a “partial list” of sensitive words has been compiled.
Almost all of those words have appeared in the paper at least once in situations that appear to deviate from the guidelines.
According to the list, “hell” is OK in the S-R except when used as a curse, as in “go to hell.”
But “pissed” is not.
Neither is “ass” when used as a reference to one’s posterior. Yet, since July 1, 1994, there have been more than 40 references in this newspaper to asses having been kicked, laughed or worked off or the location of a pain.
Interestingly, of the 21 aforementioned examples of “pissed” in print, 18 were in stories by S-R staff writers or contributors (one of them a Spokane minister) and only three in wire stories.
The S-R’s guidelines proscribe the word “boobs” as applied to breasts but I found three references to breast enhancement surgery as “boob jobs.”
“Son of a bitch”? Not acceptable, but I found it 34 times. “Fart” should be avoided as a bodily function although for some reason it’s OK to say, “old fart.” The word shows up six times with no age reference.
The scatological theme could continue indefinitely but you get the idea.
I think reader Wiley raised a valid point.
It’s true that society is a lot more casual about such language today than, say, when Clark Gable shocked moviegoers by declaring, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
But as long as newspapers are the keepers of their own standards, they shouldn’t be so quick to mirror the anything-goes attitudes that prevail on the streets.
