A [profane] word that had been in the general media a lot last week was on page 26 of The Jewish Week, a publication one might have predicted would be a holdout with respect to these things.
If we are now at a point where to accurately report the news, one must print the unprintable, we should ask how we got here, and we must consider that maybe it is due to the abandonment of earlier standards — the wisdom of our fathers and mothers — in print, in film and in speech.
A suggestion is for editors to replace it with “expletive deleted” or, if you prefer, some combination of ampersands, pound signs, question marks and exclamation points. That way, shock can be properly directed at the outrageousness of the comment and not at the paper for having printed it.
