Word: smuts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...readily perceived: Hamlet's announcement, "Then came each actor on his ass," meant then what it does now. In the first Elizabethan world - when there were some 40 euphemisms for sexual organs (including will, dial and den)-almost every passage twinkled with lewdness. Like today's cheerless smut, the Elizabethan bawdiness was both deplored and exploited. The nonsexual slang has traveled with greater success: here are the witches in Macbeth, telling each other to "cool it"; here is Anthony in Julius Caesar: "I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,/ Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech...
...phrase "banned in Boston" has been a titillating endorsement of smut for generations. Recently, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court struck down all the Commonwealth's obscenity laws as unconstitutionally vague, leaving literally nothing taboo in Cotton Mather's old domain. To fill the moral vacuum, the Massachusetts legislature's joint judiciary committee drew up a bill so graphic that when it was read aloud on the house floor by Representative Barney Frank, spectators in the gallery gasped...
...Bravo to the Supreme Court for its recent ruling on pornography [July 2]. It's about time we got tough with those greedy smut pushers and cleaned up America...
...establish limits to pornography had failed miserably. "After 15 years of experimentation and debate," said William Brennan, "I am reluctantly forced to the conclusion that none of the available formulas" are acceptable. He favored dropping all prohibitions except those to protect juveniles and adults who wish to avoid smut. As a result he opposed the Chief Justice's new effort at definition. "Even a legitimate, sharply focused state concern for the morality of the community," he said, "cannot . . . justify an assault on the protections of the First Amendment," which guarantees freedom of speech and the press. Justice William Douglas...
...exploiting erotic themes. The decree also provided that all magazines circulating in Brazil must henceforth submit copies to police censors to determine whether they conform to government standards. If the journals are not approved, the distribution of all future issues will be held up for inspection by the smut hounds...