(2 of 2)
Barnyard Bath. Torn between literal reporting and euphemisms, the daily press is still struggling for balance. "We will use so-called crude words, but only when they are relevant to telling the story," says Boston Globe Editor Tom Winship. "It's titillating to use dashes, but it's adolescent to bathe people in barnyard words."
Most large-circulation national magazines go along with Winship. Playboy takes the attitude that obscene words are not to be used for what Editorial Director A. C. Spectorsky calls "shock value or the nervous laughter they might produce, but if the editorial context calls for them, we use them." Atlantic and Harper's both feel that their audience is ready for rough language. "With our literary and sociological claims," says Atlantic Editor Robert Manning, "I see no reason why we should not make judicious use of those words if they make the difference in portraying an extreme feeling." Harper's Editor Willie Morris feels even more strongly: "We're not encouraging shock for the sake of shock. It has to be essential to the story, but we feel it is our responsibility to encourage the liberal use of these words."
The trouble with such blunt accuracy is that it may interfere with placing an event in perspective if the obscenities shock readers sufficiently to obscure the rest of the story. At the same time, as barriers to obscenity are lowered, the words will inevitably be robbed of their shock value. If Charles de Gaulle were regularly quoted using foul language, who would have understood the depth of his rage when he used the term chienlit (literally, "crap in bed") in referring to last spring's student-worker uprising? "As one who savors a good obscenity," says Roy M. Fisher, editor of the Chicago Daily News, "I would hate to see it cheapened by overexposure."
Such overexposure might well decrease, not increase, the public use of obscenity. No one throws a bomb that has no bang. Take the example of Esquire, which published Norman Mailer's scatological novel An American Dream five years ago (but asked Novelist Bernard Malamud last fall to change two obscene phrases in a short story; he refused, and the Atlantic printed the story and the two phrases). "We're using four-letter words less and less just because they've surfaced," says Editor Harold Hayes. "They're losing their force." This spring he plans to publish an article on that subject entitled, appropriately, "— Is No Longer a Dirty Word."