The New York Times printed the word shit today in a story about what President Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair after the Group of 8 summit, unaware his mic was live:
“I feel like telling [Secretary General Kofi Annan] to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen,” he said to Mr. Blair, referring to Syria’s president, Bashir Assad. “See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over,” Mr. Bush said.
Gawker wonders if this little shit is a first for the language-conservative Times. It’s not, but it’s extremely rare. This is a paper, after all, that’s squeamish about printing hell or damn unless they’re used in combat reporting or similar “extreme circumstances.” As for stronger obscenities, the paper’s trusty Manual of Style and Usage notes that “[e]xceptions have been made only a handful of times” to the rule that “The Times virtually never prints obscene words.”
Short of a thorough LexisNexis search, one of the few instances of shit in the Times was in 1974, when it published transcripts of White House conversations that figured into the Watergate scandal. “Expressions highly objectionable by Times standards were printed because of the light they shed on a historic matter, the possibility of a presidential impeachment,” explains the style manual.
Plus, let’s face it, I don’t think The Times liked Nixon much. I don’t think it likes Bush much, either; but at any rate, the paper seems to have relaxed its shit standard, seeing as how the current president’s comment is nowhere near as damaging or inflammatory as the Watergate tapes.