Paper Monitor
11:54 UK time, Wednesday, 23 May 2012
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
What's the right thing for a publication to do when stories get all sweary?
Do they include the sweary words as they were sworn, and thus risk startling the gentler reader?
Or do they draw a chaste veil over the exact horror of the words in question, by using initial letters and an appropriate number of asterisks (thus giving crossword solvers extra practice.... "a six-letter adjective beginning with c?")
This approach risks irritating people who expect their publication to communicate with them like adults, not like Mary Poppins.
If only Malcolm Tucker were to be called before the Leveson Inquiry, we'd see the whole gamut of treatments.
For sake of reference, the publication you are currently reading generally uses swear words in full, without asterisks or dashes, but only when the word is absolutely central to the story. We won't set off F-bombs lightly.
It all gets a bit trickier though when the story in question is regarding censorship, particularly if there's a whiff that someone is being prudish. Enter, today's Times.
Ken Loach's new film, hotly tipped in Cannes, sounds like it's full of colourful Glaswegian demotic. But he has , the UK's film classification body, will not give it a 15 certificate unless he moderates his language.
Paper Monitor feels entitled to quote this passage, as is, including asterisks, because this is how the Times is reporting it.
"'I think we were allowed seven c***s,' Loach said. 'But only two of them could be aggressive c***s.' His producer Rebecca O'Brien chipped in: 'We were allowed to keep in all the non-aggressive c***s. I think we just sort of covered up the other c***s.'"
And yet elsewhere in today's paper readers are exposed to tales of beheadings, mutilation, scalpings, and electric shock torture. And a photograph in one of the paper's digital editions showing a man prising his own eyeball out of his face in a display of religious piety.
Still, at least there's no actual swearing.
Finally, special mention for the intriguing story on the front page of today's Daily Telegraph reporting the surprising rise in sales of fountain pens. Now where has one seen that before?
The 
