Word: uses
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Dashes, asterisks and euphemisms are still the way out chosen by most editors. But "if the image of the word is already formed in the mind of the reader," says John Seigenthaler, editor of the Nashville Tennessean, "you might as well use the word. We have the responsibility of getting over to the reader exactly what was said. We should say what we have to say in this society and say it accurately...
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...
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...
Salesman is surely one of the most moving and accomplished examples of cinema verite so far. Yet ultimately, the Maysles brothers are crippled by the inherent limitations of their technique. Although they use flash-forwards and other devices of fictional film, they are still bound to include only what actually happened in front of their camera. They cannot re-create or conjecture; they must rely solely on the moment itself. Federico Fellini once asked, "Why should people go to the movies, if films only show reality through a very cold, objective eye? It would be much better just to walk...