The Sacred And The Profane

When Charles Rocket let slip an obscenity on Saturday Night Live 18 years ago, he was summarily fired. But when ready-for-prime-time-player Al Michaels, thinking he was in a commercial break, uttered a four-letter profanity on the Dec. 28 episode of Monday Night Football, he was not made to fall on his sword or, more accurately, to fall on his s-word.

This owes something to the fact that profanity has become a sonic Starbucks, so common a part of the cultural landscape that we hardly notice it anymore. Michaels's own MNF boothmate Boomer Esiason published a novel called Toss last November in which the f-word appears nine times—and that's just on page 114.

To be fair, Boomer's roman � clef is set largely in a locker room, and people in locker rooms tend to talk as if they're in a locker room. So sports journalists have long agonized over how to accurately quote athletes and coaches whose language would drop the jaw of the saltiest sea captain. Taped TV has the bleep, though we can still read lips. Radio has the seven-second delay. In print President Nixon's potty mouth necessitated the bracketed phrase expletive deleted. But comic strips have perfected this artful dodge, giving us the timeless epithet %#&@! For my money, that is the best way to handle profanity in print, leaving most of it to the imagination. One doesn't need to have everything spelled out—indeed, that's why nudist colonies are so unpopular. (That, and the people.)

Other options are less satisfactory. It is the practice of many newspapers to "clean up" quotes, so an outside linebacker with prison tattoos might say in your morning sports section, "That's baloney, total buildups, and the next time we play that faker, I will personally kick his fanny." Such euphemizing helps explain why former Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda is thought to be a grandfatherly raconteur, when in fact his language would make Buddy Hackett blush. A typical Bob Knight postgame press briefing could not be telecast on HBO, not even as part of Def Comedy Jam.

We would elaborate, but profanity is seldom allowed to coarsen the pages of this magazine. Granted, many stories do contain curious constructions like "s—" and "a———," but that's only to allow you, the reader, to play a fun new guessing game: Obscene Hangman.

An overreliance on profanity is said to be the mark of a small vocabulary. But surely there is value in an occasional Tourette's-caliber cussing jag. Mark Twain recognized as much, saying, "In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer." Don't believe him? Then hit yourself on the thumb with a hammer.

Nobody knew the therapeutic value of a curse word better than former catcher and Baltimore Orioles announcer Clay Dalrymple, a most colorful colorman, who once misidentified himself on the air as Clay Dairymaple. The O's were getting shelled during a game in the early 1980s, to the broadcaster's increasing agitation, when manager Earl Weaver belatedly went to the bullpen. Exasperated, Dalrymple told television viewers throughout greater Baltimore precisely what each of them was already thinking.

"They're going to bring in Tippy Martinez," said Dalrymple, "to try to put an end to this bulls —."

Only he didn't use the dashes. He said the whole cathartic word. That's right: He said, "%#&@!"