Let’s be candid. It’s darned hard to write authoritatively about the undue use of coarse language in a family newspaper.
By listing a few contentious words for purpose of illustration, you risk being hammered simply for repeating the offence.
And if you don’t use the disputed words, you’re dismissed as a prude and an incomprehensible one at that.
So bear with me while we tiptoe through the minefield, hoping to avoid the offence of further promoting vulgarity and profanity in a society that can be both vulgar and profane.
First, it was a school teacher who called. She complained about a couple of expressions that had surfaced in The Star’s early coverage of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
The teacher said her Grade 5ers were gobbling up The Star’s Olympic coverage, thanks to the newspaper in education program. But wouldn’t it have been better for a columnist to describe the anti-doping controls on athletes as “urine tests” rather than use, gratuitously, the P-word?
The teacher also felt it unnecessary for another columnist to label the Olympics as “the Goddamn Games.”
(The columnist had amplified and explained her use of the term thusly: “Damn the terrorists. Damn the America bashers, and damn the International Olympic Committee, if it thought it could keep the spectre of
9/11 out of the Opening Ceremonies.”)
A third expression at which the teacher took offence was (blush!), “tough titties for Jamie Sal and David Pelletier,” who then appeared doomed to Olympic silver in pairs skating, at the hands of double-dealing judges.
Eric Partridge’s Dictionary Of Slang And Unconventional English describes the term complained of as a “low colloquialism” that means, “Hard luck!” and means it rather unsympathetically.
The teacher found this calibre of language unbecoming to The Star and “unacceptable,” especially to children in a classroom setting.
“I will recommend to the principal that our school stop using The Star in the classroom,” she said, rejecting outright an ombud’s notion that no daily newspaper can survive and prosper if it tailors its content entirely to children.
Another, more potent, protest to the language in recent Olympic sports coverage was launched by e-mail from a mother of two children, ages 10 and 6. Her objections included: a three-letter word for posterior anatomy, a Yiddish word for penis, a word used to describe a child of unmarried parents, and the word “wusses.”
(The Canadian Oxford Dictionary defines the latter term as a piece of North American slang, “origin unknown,” for “an inept, feeble or cowardly person.” Nothing to indicate that the recorders of English believe wuss is anything more than an uncomplimentary term.)
“The words schmuck and wusses are not English,” the complainant wrote. “Ass, bastard and damn are downright filthy and certainly have no place in a family newspaper.”
With a flourish, she concluded: “The Star can certainly hire much better columnists . . . . who can write proper English without resorting to dirty and inappropriate vocabulary.”
As close readers of the two complaints already have noticed, readers draw the line on taste in different places.
The ombud (whose vocabulary can vary according to the setting or the degree of provocation) is sometimes surprised by the paucity of complaints about questionable language in the paper.
Clearly (and regrettably, it says here), many readers nowadays accept the gratuitous use of street talk as part of a newspaper’s vocabulary.
Otherwise, how to explain the fact that no reader protested when a columnist quoted an unnamed business woman, 50, as saying:
“Julie has climbed to the top by being tougher than any of the guys by denying who she really is and . . . by eating a lot of s—.”
In contravention of The Star’s complex rules on the use of “swear words and sexually charged terms,” the
S-word was printed without the required dashes. The same dictum notes that such words “should never be used” unless they’re in direct quotations. “And even when quoted, they should be used sparingly (i.e., only when the words are uttered by a major public figure),” it says.
A brief summing-up may be in order.
To some degree, crudity, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder. Readers don’t share the same level of tolerance for the off-colour stuff.
Yet we’re all aware, sometimes painfully so, of the discourse on buses, school playgrounds, and at ice level during Hockey Night In Canada.
So it’s hard for editors, relentlessly trying to tell stories in the language of the times, to decide where to draw the line on taste.
From this corner, though, comes the suggestion, welcome or not, that it’s usually better to aim higher. Readers will understand.
