Made In America - Bill Bryson [206]
Despite the growing explicitness of books and movies, in most other areas of public discourse – notably in newspapers, radio and local and network television – America remains perhaps the most extraordinarily cautious nation in the developed world. Words, pictures and concepts that elsewhere excite no comment or reaction remain informally banned from most American media.
In 1991 the Columbia Journalism Review ran a piece on the coverage of a briefly infamous argument between Pittsburgh Pirates Manager Jim Leyland and his star player Barry Bonds. It examined how thirteen newspapers from around the country had dealt with the livelier epithets the two men had hurled at each other. Without exception the papers had replaced the offending words with ellipses or dashes, or else had changed them to something lighter – making ‘kissing your ass’ into ‘kissing your butt’, for instance. To an outside observer there are two immediately arresting points here: first, that ‘kissing your ass’ is still deemed too distressingly graphic for modern American newspaper readers, and, secondly, that ‘kissing your butt’ is somehow thought more decorous. Even more arresting is that the Columbia Journalism Review, though happy to revel in the discomfort at which the papers had found themselves, could not bring itself to print the objectionable words either, relying instead on the coy designations ‘the F-word’ and ‘the A-word’.
Examples of such hyperprudence are not hard to find. In 1987 the New York Times columnist William Safire wrote about the expression cover your ass without being able to bring himself to record the phrase, though he had no hesitation in listing many expressive synonyms: butt, keister, rear end, tail. In the same year, when a serious art-house movie called Sammy and Rosie Get Laid was released, Safire refused to name the film in his column (the New York Times itself would not accept an ad with the full title). Safire explained: ‘I will not print the title here because I deal with a family trade; besides, it is much more titillating to ostentatiously avoid the slang term.’50 Pardon me? On the one hand he wishes to show an understandable consideration for our sense of delicacy; but on the other he is happy to titillate us – indeed, it appears to be his desire to heighten our titillation. Such selective self-censorship would seem to leave American papers open to charges of, at the very least, inconsistency.
In pursuit of edification, I asked Allan M. Siegal, assistant managing editor of the New York Times, what rules on bad language obtain at the paper. ‘I am happy to say we maintain no list of proscribed expressions,’ Siegal replied. ‘In theory, any expression could be printed if it were central to a reader’s understanding of a hugely important news development.’ He noted that the Times had used shit in reports on the Watergate transcripts, and also ass, crap and dong ’in similarly serious contexts, like the Clarence Thomas sexual harassment hearings’.
Such instances, it should be noted, are extremely exceptional. Between 1980 and July 1993, shit appeared in the New York Times just once (in a book review by Paul Theroux). To put that in context, during the period in review the Times published something on the order of 400 million to 500 million words of text. Piss appeared three times (twice in book reviews, once in an art review). Laid appeared thirty-two times, but each time in reference to the movie that Safire could not bring himself to name. Butthead or butthole appeared sixteen times, again almost always in reference to a particular proper noun, such as the