That four letter word

[anotheoldgit]

In an extract of the book, Boulton writes: "The events of that week in September 1997 were very sad, but as the spinners from Downing Street came to Buckingham Palace and started to kick around what roles Harry and William should play in the funeral, the Queen had relished the moment when Philip had bellowed over the speakerphone from Balmoral: '**** off. We are talking about two boys who have lost their mother'. Once the arrangements had been sorted out Blair read the lesson very melodramatically that day in the abbey."

This was how the Guardian reported this story.

----------------------------------------------------------------- Prince Philip exploded in a foul-mouthed tirade at Downing Street plans to manage the funeral of Princess Diana in 1997, it has been revealed.

The true extent of the Duke of Edinburgh's rage was disclosed for the first time yesterday amid claims the Queen relished the moment her furious husband told officials from No 10 to 'f*** off.

This is how the so called sensation arousing Daily Mail reported it, much more tasteful don't you think?

PS. I have just checked this, before I submitted it, and the four letter word as printed in the Guardian has been censored by the editor of Answerbank. All you will see is this ****, but believe me the Guardian did print the word in full..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/sep/20/ad amboulton.media1

[tigerlily11]

As interesting as the is AOG, whats the question?

[anotheoldgit]

Oh all right, if you want to nit-pick tiger.

Should this four letter word be published in a family newspaper?

or

Is the Daily Mail more protective against offending their readers than the Guardian is?

or

Would it be quite acceptable for a national newspaper to print all other unacceptable words in full?

Happy now?

[jno]

by and large, the 'broadsheets' (most of which aren't any more) spell words out in full; they make no claim to being family newspapers, seeing their audience as adults who can safely have the truth reported to them. However, the Independent got a bit of stick when it reported what Mike Gatting called a Pakistani umpire; it involved the C word, which would also be asterisked here. Clearly we do know rather more about the incident, and about Gatting, because the story was printed in full, which seems fair enough to me.

I'm not too sure why the Mail chooses to leave its readers in the dark about what Philip actually said; but I don't think you're right in assuming that the Guardian was trying to sensationalise it - on the contrary, it was reporting exactly what took place, which is what newspapers are for.

[Postdog]

How many kids do you know read the Guardian?

Come to that, if they did, then surely they would be intelligent enough not to be offended by the word.

[tigerlily11]

A question often helps as I wasn't sure what it was you wanted to know.
Seeing how this all happened some ten years ago now.
To be honest it's just a word.
If it's used in the right context, which it often isn't, then I can't see why not.
Family papers are very rarely read by children, and they will hear it some where else any way on a daily basis.
The image of Philip using it is funny to be honest.
Sort of like the idea of him and Liz getting it on.
But they must of at least 4 times.
He said it so it should be printed.

[anotheoldgit]

Well it seems like there are plenty of liberal minded posters here on AB.

So lets turn this on it's head shall we, if the word had been Ni**er or even P**i, what then?

[jno]

same answer. If Prince Philip chooses to use those words about his wife's subjects, I'd like to hear about it.

[Quinlad]

AOG, this gripe has no logic.

Anyone reading the word 'f***' in a newspaper knows what full well what the words mean. We agree on that surely?

If not, by not printing the word in full, is the paper trying to protect a fictional group that is old enough to want to read a newspaper but sheltered enough not to know what 'f***' could mean? Is that what it's doing?

If the problem is submitting regular readers who do know the word to the sight of the letters written down on the page, then that's just weird. They know what the word is. What difference does the sight of the shapes make?

If any mention of the word is deemed offensive, the Mail could choose to omit it and instead say that the Duke "uttered an expletive" or "a sexual swear word".

Protecting the readers' eyes by substituting letters with asterisks is pointless and nanny-like. Even with N***** or p***.

[anotheoldgit]

For once I agree with you Quinlad.

But we live in a nanny world of political correctness, and double standards.

If the roles had been reversed then we would have had plenty on this site criticising The Mail, not to mention the outrage if any form of the media spoke or wrote those other words likely to cause an offence. How many times do you hear these words described as the 'F' word, the 'C' word, the 'N' word or the 'P' word?

I am all for calling a spade a spade, as long as these words are not used in a way likely to cause offence. After all they are only words, and if any particular ones are not allowed to be wrote or spoken then none of the others should be also.

[chrisrob]

From the weekly newsletter of World Wide Words this week:
"CLBUTTIC MISTAKE This one has been circulating online for some
time, but surfaced in an article in the Daily Telegraph earlier
this month under the running head "President Abraham Lincoln was
buttbuttinated by an armed buttailant after a life devoted to the
reform of the US consbreastution." Yes, it's our old friends the
incompetent programmers of obscenity filters. They've decided that
certain nasty words in e-mail and on Web sites shouldn't just be
deleted, but converted to something more tasteful: "butt" replaces
"ass", "tit" is turned into "breast", and so on. The problem is
that they do it to such strings of letters within words as well as
whole words. Such slack programming once caused e-mail references
to the English town of Scunthorpe to be rejected by filters. We
must hope that the torrents of ridicule heaped upon their heads
will cause them to rewrite their code more carefully."

Apologies about the poor formatting.