Blog Glob: "Bleeping Expletives" (NY Times)

Excerpt:

Today we are going to deal with the media coverage of profanities, expletives, vulgarisms, obscenities, execrations, epithets and imprecations, nouns often lumped together by the Bluenose Generation as coarseness, crudeness, bawdiness, scatology or swearing. But roundheeled readers should stop smacking their lips and rubbing their hands because the deliberately shocking subject can be treated with decorum, in plain words, without the titillating examples of “dirty words.” (Titillating, from the Latin titillare, “to tickle,” is clean.)

If you want to fulminate about such prissiness about prurience in print, feel free to rattle your jowls, blow your stack and otherwise express your outrage with the typographical device to which cartoonists have resorted for generations: !#*&%@%!!!

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. ...

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