Fit to Print collects the literary gyrations that the New York Times uses to avoid saying bad words such as "dang" and "jeez" and "fiddlesticks."
"A derogatory word for gay men, followed, alliteratively, by freak"
"A master of the bitter and unprintable insults (His denunciations made me recall the title of an old Fairport Convention album, Expletive Delighted)"
"The rapper French Montana gave an unaswer that features two unprintable worlds with that between them"
"Mr. Lee blasted a dictionary's worth of unprintable words at developers"
"Let me be clear to you, he said. You ever do that to me again, I'll throw you off this balcony, infusing it with an obscenity favored by mobsters."
It looks a culture of giggling cleverness, of writers more impressed by optimized circumlocutions than the subjects they refer to. In the absence of policy, they'd use still them—at least for as long as they could get away with it! [via Kottke]
