4 May 2009
Saturday’s NY Times ran an op-ed piece by lawyer Alan Freedman on the recent Federal Communications Commission ruling prohibiting “fleeting expletives” on the nation’s airwaves. While it’s not a bad summary of the issue, the piece contains a couple of questionable lines. For one thing, the article couldn’t even bring itself to use the euphemism “F-word,” not even when referring to Jesse Sheidlower’s book of that title, calling it instead a “book on swearing.” Evidently, it’s NY Times editorial practice to avoid the euphemism “F-word.” (Even when doing so is silly.)
Freedman also pens this ludicrous line, “As much as one sympathizes with language prescriptivism in general [...], censorship is necessarily a descriptivist endeavor.” What he means is that the standards of censorship evolve with the language, but what he writes is nonsensical. One would think an editor with enough influence to get Freedman to change “F-Word” could also have flagged a clearly incorrect statement like this.
