The mistaken old fucks at The New York Times

The New York Times has a replete searchable archive. Every issue is there. But every issue from before 1996 has been OCRed (has had optical character recognition performed on it) and in general has not been checked by human eyes. The result is that sometimes the words you see online are not the words that were in print. And word forms are sometimes misrecognized as other lexical items, such as fuck, rather than as unintelligible collections of characters. (The word fuck per se has appeared many times in The New York Times even before recent years, especially in excerpts from books.)

And so we get this headline from September 29, 1950:

Fucks and Wilt Will Speak

Sweary links #19

Is April really the cruelest month? Not when you can divert yourself with sweary news, tweets, and music.

Sweary links #3

The sweary links are arriving thick and fast these days. Here’s a fresh batch of foul-mouthed items of interest.

The Globe and Mail, having published the band name Fucked Up, robustly defends the decision.

It wasn’t all nasty, brutish and short. Countering the myth of Anglo-Saxon swearing.

Finding the poetry in Kim Sears’ profanity.