Big effing deal

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/11/2011 (5233 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WARNING: I will use profanity in this post.

If you don’t like to read profane words, here is a picture of some adorable puppies who need homes. Click here to read how you can help, and don’t scroll down past the puppies unless you like your language salty. Or blue. Or obscene. Or vulgar.

 

So, to get to the point, Pat Martin used a couple of swear words on the internet. Specifically, the MP for Winnipeg Centre took to Twitter, mad about the government’s invoking of closure on the federal budget. And he didn’t mince words:

"This is a fucking disgrace…closure again. And on the Budget! There’s not a democracy in the world that would tolerate this jackboot shit," he tweeted.

"For gods sake. In these uncertain economic times, don’t you think our parliament should be debating our federal budget? Some due diligence?" he tweeted shortly after.

A follower took offence. But not to the swearing! 

"Sad how a foul mouth socialist capitalizes "Budget" but not "god"," sent LettingSmokeOut.

Martin’s response was concise:

And that, as they say, went viral.

Completely lost in the furour was Martin’s original point about invoking closure. When I thought about it this morning, I thought it was kind of ironic.

I tweeted: "thought: Invoking closure is the "fuck you" of parliamentary process. And "fuck you" is invoking closure on discussion."

But in the always-on media firehose these days, I was way behind the story. Heck, most newspapers had the story in their print editions! And that’s when I really got to thinking.

How would newspapers choose to cover the swearing? Would they say "fuck" or would they switch to "f-word" or "effing" as I did in the headline to this blog post?

I’ve checked a few places online, but I couldn’t get my hands on too many hard copies. Here’s the variation that I found:

• The Winnipeg Free Press was all over the map. In their print edition on Wednesday, they removed the "fuck" from Martin’s first tweet, and replaced it with "(expletive)" but they merely replaced the last three letters of "shit" with hyphens, so the whole quote read: "This is a (expletive) disgrace…closure again. And on the Budget! There’s not a democracy in the world that would tolerate this jackboot s—"

The Freep, online, included unexpurgated versions of the tweets in a separate section, below a story that censored the swears with hyphens.

• The Winnipeg Sun censored the swears to "f—" and "s—" for their print edition, but included the full words in their online stories, along with a top-of-story warning. Other Sun-chain newspapers kept the censoring online as well. (The Brandon Sun is not part of that chain, despite our name.) The reporter who wrote the Winnipeg Sun story told me that there was much newsroom discussion about it, "especially for print."

• online Winnipeg news outlet ChrisD.ca told me that he went with "F-bomb" specifically "to keep things G-rated for younger readers."

• The Toronto Star went with hyphens online. I don’t know what their print edition contained.

• The Globe and Mail replaced the swears online with "[expletive]" and, like several other organizations, danced around the words by referring to them as "F-bombs" when not being directly quoted. Again, I don’t know what their print edition contained, but I do know I’ve read the word "fuck" in their printed paper on previous occasions (usually arts or opinion columns).

• The National Post also used hyphens when they quoted the swears, although they linked to the original tweets. A photo they used on their home page blurred out the profanities from a screen shot of the tweets.

• CBC News, online, used "f—ing" and "sh–", which is sort of a half-censorship, keeping the verb tense, and obeying the compound consonant in shit. They also called Martin’s response "curt", which for visually confusing reasons alone is NOT a word I would have chosen to use in a story about profanities. Later, a CBC reporter tweeted that he had been told "Shit is okay across the board".

I later noticed that CBC seems to be the only news organization that, in quoting Martin’s later tweet of explanation, also censored the word "pissed", turning it into "p—ed". Most just printed it.

• CTV News also went with "f—" and "sh–", though they didn’t keep the verb tense in "fucking," choosing instead six hyphens in a row for "f——". (You’d have to count hyphens to figure out if it was "fucked" or "fucking".)

• Sun News Network follows an interesting style of their own. When pulling from the Sun chain of papers, they stick with "f—" but in their own content, like their poll or this edited screen grab, they’ve censored the swears to "f–k" and "s–t".

In reading Martin’s tweets, SNN’s social media reporter said on air "this is a bleeping disgrace," which I kind of love for its meta-ness, and she replaced "shit" with "stuff."

• The Canadian Press wire service sent out a story where all the swear words had been replaced with "(expletive)", although they had this boldface note to editors at the top of the story: "Eds:The deleted expletives, for those who wish to publish them, are “fucking” para 3, “shit” para 4 and “Fuck” para 9"

• most importantly to me, my boss suggested "How about F-egg?"

Oddly, if you’re going to follow the "rules", all of these reactions are plain ol’ wrong. The Canadian Press publishes a regular Stylebook that helps keep Canadian publications on the same page (heh) when it comes to grammar, punctuation and style. It ensures that newspapers across the country are consistent in certain basic ways — we use a.m. and p.m. not AM and PM, for example.

The Stylebook also addresses profanity. I have the second-most recent edition, but the advice hasn’t changed for a while, so I doubt it’s gotten more straightlaced in the most-recent edition.

"Casual obscenity, blasphemy and vulgarity are not wanted in the news report," the Stylebook clearly states, on an early page. "There are few exceptions. A prominent figure who uses obscene language in a public situation is one."

Oh, hello Mr. Martin!

So what should news organizations do when faced with a newsworthy occurence of a swear word? The Stylebook continues:

"When an obscenity or vulgarity must be reported, do not use the prissy device of replacing some letters of the offensive words with hyphens, or use an euphamism such as effing or f-word. Put the questionable language in a separate paragraph that can be readily deleted by editors who do not want to use it."

I can’t find a single example of a news organization that followed this (very sensible) rule. Instead, they near-uniformly chose prissyness. How odd.

You might even say: What the fuck?

Update:

Google’s Ngram Book Viewer, which allows you to graph the popularity of certain words and phrases over time, isn’t much help here, if you’re curious.

First of all, I think the hyphens in "f-bomb" and "f-word" and "f—" confuse it (a minus sign in front of a search term generally means ignore). And I get nothing but a flat line when I seach for "f bomb" without the hyphen.

Annoyingly, in the 1800s, people were still using the long-s, which is that soft-sounding letter s that looks like a lowercase f without the crossbar, so searching for "f word" gets me a lot of books talking about swords.

I thought "fuck", though, was instructive. It looks like it’s on a big comeback!

A least, I thought it was, until I graphed it against "shit":

And that’s when I realized all those 19th-century "fucks" were really "sucks." Yes, I confused fuck-and-suck. The long-s strikes again!

Update II

When I got to work on Monday, I had an email waiting from Tim Cook, news editor at the Canadian Press. Like many media people who contacted me, he enjoyed the piece (us news people love insidery news about news people).

Tim’s email alerted me that, despite my assumption (isn’t there an aphorism here?), the CP Stylebook’s advice on obscenity had indeed changed!

Along with acknowledging that there is a wider, less-filtered audience for the Canadian Press wire than ever before, thanks to automatic syndication over the internet, Tim quoted for me the new guidelines:

"There are few exceptions where obscene language should be part of our news report. A prominent figure who uses obscene language in a public situation could be one."

Ack! It used to say "A public figure … is one" and now it says "could be one."

That puts Pat Martin’s tweets squarely in "could be" territory.

Well, that explains why the Canadian Press removed the expletives and explained how editors could add them back in, but it doesn’t explain why so many news organizations used the "prissy device" of hyphens. Old habits, I supposed.

At least nobody said "fuddle duddle."