No Bad Daddy Words

You might find this hard to believe, but we get writers around
here who constantly want to use the F-word in their stories—and
presumably in their lives. (My daughters call this the “F-swear,” which
they’ve heard daddy say once or twice, I’m sorry to say. To which I
have responded, “Do as I say… not, uh….. as I do—say… er. Never
mind. Just don’t use that word. It’s a bad daddy word.” ) Why do so
many writers wish to use that word? Because they see so many other
writers getting to use that word in other publications.

When
we first launched The Rake three years ago, we considered whether or
not we were going to print that word. It slipped into a few early
issues, but only in direct quotes, and more or less under our breath.
(If you can find the issue and the story, I will personally buy you
dinner and drinks, no kidding. But you may have to sign a
confidentiality agreement, heh heh.)

We never would have
decided that it was OK to print the word in display type (a headline,
or a pull quote, or any other loud context), and we always intended to
work very hard to find alternatives to the word, even in direct quotes.
This can be an interesting challenge, and it leads to some artful
editing—which is one of the little word-geek things that makes this job
fun.

For example, in this month’s short story, by Sara Woster.
The story is about a young girl whose father spends a lot of time
teaching her outdoor survival skills. At one point in the story, the
girl is speaking to another girl—a teenager—at the side of a hotel
swimming pool somewhere in South Dakota. Here is the exchange:

“How long can you tread water?” Laurie asked, inching toward her father, who was holding open the door to the hotel.

“Who cares? It’s the goddam prairie. There is no water,” the girl said.

Now
Sara’s original draft had the girl saying “It’s the fucking prairie.”
That is a much stronger word, much more acidic, and really works a lot
better than “goddam.” It rings truer, and hits the ear better. But a
policy is a policy. We made the story a teeny-tiny bit worse—something
we never otherwise do, especially in a piece of fiction—because we
simply do not print that word. It wasn’t that big a trade-off, in the
grand scheme of things, and Sara was gracious about it.

When we
were considering whether or not to take a hard line on this policy, I
called up Adam Moss, who was at the time the editor of the New York
Times magazine, and I asked him if the word “fuck” had ever appeared in
the New York Times. Everyone at the Times knows the answer to that
question. The word “fuck” appeared once, in a direct quote from Richard
Nixon.

So that is now OUR official policy, too, and we think
it’s a good one: Only Richard Nixon gets to say “fuck” in print, and
he’s dead (though I suppose he is still imminently quotable).

Also, we get to say it on the web. Just this once, maybe.—The Editor in Cheese