Snark of Record
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 01:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jesse_the_kAdam Liptak, in today's New York Times, has a whole lot of fun not writing "fuck."
The occasion is the oral arguments in Federal Communications Commission v Fox Broadcasting Systems, to be heard this Tuesday. The issue is whether every use of "fuck" is obscene. Fox says when various award presenters spoke the word on live TV, it was not obscene because it was functioning as an intensifier, like "way," or "very."
For example: Bono’s exclamation, [the judge] added, is “a prime example of a nonliteral use” that has “no sexual connotation.” In support of that proposition, she cited remarks from President Bush (about the need to get Hezbollah to stop doing, uh, stuff) and Vice President Dick Cheney (urging Senator Patrick Leahy to start doing something not biologically possible).
The reporter, true to his Timesman creed, notes that the OED claims the euphemism F-word "first appeared in 1973, in this newspaper." Should we be grateful or annoyed?
The occasion is the oral arguments in Federal Communications Commission v Fox Broadcasting Systems, to be heard this Tuesday. The issue is whether every use of "fuck" is obscene. Fox says when various award presenters spoke the word on live TV, it was not obscene because it was functioning as an intensifier, like "way," or "very."
For example: Bono’s exclamation, [the judge] added, is “a prime example of a nonliteral use” that has “no sexual connotation.” In support of that proposition, she cited remarks from President Bush (about the need to get Hezbollah to stop doing, uh, stuff) and Vice President Dick Cheney (urging Senator Patrick Leahy to start doing something not biologically possible).
The reporter, true to his Timesman creed, notes that the OED claims the euphemism F-word "first appeared in 1973, in this newspaper." Should we be grateful or annoyed?