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Loosening Up

New York Times Uses F Word

Because it’s in the first sentence of a quoted book.

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Oh, sh-t. Looks like the Grey Lady’s prim and proper days are numbered. The New York Times broke its longstanding refusal to print the F word in its storied pages without astericks when, on Sunday, in T, the Times’s fashion magazine, it dropped the bomb. The sentence reads, “Quit fucking black cops or get booted from the Communist party,” and is the opener for the new novel, “Dissident Gardens,” by Jonathan Lethem. Lethem, for his part, is “delighted,” by the milestone, and says, “If I’d had the foresight to make it one of my life’s aspirations, I’d have done so. Instead it lands as dumb luck.”

Read it at Salon

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