Friday, July 1, 2016

What’s the News That’s Fit to Print?

The Language of The New York Times 
   In 1897, Adolph S. Ochs, the owner of The New York Times, created the slogan "All the News That's Fit to Print," which still appears today on the masthead of the paper. For Ochs, the main point of the slogan was to declare that the news would be reported impartially, in contrast to the practice of competing sensationalist tabloids.
   But there is also a second meaning, one that asserts that the paper will report only the news that’s fit to print, perhaps also in contrast to tabloids that have stepped over the boundaries of good taste.  This is how I have understood the Times motto all these years, taking it that nothing in the paper would resemble the notorious Page Four of the New York Daily News—or worse.
   That “worse” refers to what is euphemistically (and, strictly speaking, misleadingly) called “explicit” language, meaning that a word such as “penis” would not appear in the Times’s pages. A story by Jan Hoffman, in the June 30 edition is entitled, “Most Women Prefer to Go Bare, Citing Hygiene (and Baffling Doctors).”1 If that title is a bit obscure, the article itself is perfectly clear: its subject is the (surprising) practice of women, especially younger ones, of ridding themselves of their pubic hair by various methods—e.g. shaving or waxing. The fact that the story drew 1091 comments on the Times website, by the evening of its publication is alone confirmation of the viability of the relaxation of Times policy of yore. Additional support comes from the comments themselves, though I only sampled them; my scholarly bent did not extend to perusing the entire thousand.
   The comments (no doubt monitored), like the article, use the “scientific” (Latinate) vocabulary of female sexual equipment, with not a hint of the Anglo-Saxon equivalents that are vastly more common in general use. However, many of the ones I sampled simply refer to that region “down there.”
   The article is interesting enough, if not transcendently so. I bring it up, because it goes about as far toward in linguistic “modernity” as the New York Times has gone.
   What to conclude? The Times has come a long way. I’m doubtful that it will go much further—but who knows? It would be interesting to see an account of the stages the Times underwent from its most proper past to the linguistic freedom it has now reached. Perhaps some institutional historian will tell that story.
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