William Safire: Today we are going to deal with the media coverage of profanities, expletives, vulgarisms, obscenities, execrations, epithets and imprecations. The need for today’s review is the coverage given to the participial modifier employed with great frequency and immortalized on recordings of telephone conversations made by the F.B.I. as its shocked — shocked! — agents eavesdropped on Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor. His favorite intensifier was reproduced in many newspapers and Internet sites with dashes as “----ing” or with asterisks as “****ing” and was substituted in broadcasts, telecasts and Netcasts as a word descriptive of the sound called bleep. The Wall Street Journal went almost all the way, using both the first letter and three dashes in the participle before “golden,” the word it modified.
From the archive: The New York Times said Cheney had used "an obscenity" against Patrick Leahy. The Los Angeles Times had Cheney saying "Go ... yourself." CNN said Cheney used "the F-word." But The Washington Post printed the word yesterday for the first time since publishing the Kenneth Starr report in 1998. And that set the town buzzing. "Readers need to judge for themselves what the word is because we don't play games at The Washington Post and use dashes."
For the judges: "Fuck yourself," said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency.
See also: Mr. Leahy then suggested that the president of the Senate take his gavel and use it to perform an act that, while not technically impossible in anatomical terms, would certainly be considered both unseemly and unhygienic, and which would require an unusual combination of single-minded ambition and physical relaxation.
Finally: The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation.
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