AFTER DEADLINE

By Jim Kelly

As with most kids, swearing was a no-no in our house, and there was no appeal if you "slipped": a one-way trip to your room without dinner and yet another item to add to the list for Saturday's confession.

I even remember trying to argue "H-E-double toothpicks" on a technicality, and losing.

I'm not sure where I picked up my first swear words, but I know it wasn't from the two daily newspapers that came into our house.

Considering the cesspool that passes for dialogue on TV, humor on the radio and conversation just about anywhere, I'm proud that newspapers are among the last outposts of civility when it comes to the use of language.

But before I get too preachy and righteous, I want to acknowledge that there has been erosion of the standards that we have for filtering the words that get into the paper. As profanity and crudity have grown more common, bad language has occasionally taken root. Sometimes we've even done it ourselves, trying to appeal to younger readers by writing less formally, casually using expressions like "pissed" and "sucks" in reviews, features and columns.

Some days, salty language pops up in places you'd least expect it, which makes it that much more jarring. Several readers complained about Deb Aoki's cartoon on the

Island Life cover last Sunday, in which a character sputtered "Dammit!" to a misbehaving dog. "Darn it!" or the old reliable #@&*#! would have made the point just as directly.

I'm not a prude. In fact, it's laughable hypocrisy for me to write about profanity. I sometimes think I've spent the last 30 years trying to make up for lost time since that H-E-double toothpicks business.

But when it comes to profanity and vulgarity in the newspaper, I take a hard line. After a spate of low-grade swear words and gratuitous "Oh my Gods" popped up in the paper, editors were recently reminded that our policy is simple: We don't use profanities, vulgarities or obscenities in the paper.

The rare exception would be in a quote — somebody uses a bad word. Ninety percent of the time, a reporter can paraphrase around it. But sometimes the quote is too powerful, or so revealing about the person that it can't be cut or paraphrased. In that case, a senior editor needs to sign off on its use.

Sounds simple enough. Back when George Carlin did his shtick about the seven dirty words, and I was doing time up in my room, it was pretty easy to find agreement on what constitutes profanity, vulgarity and obscenity. But as Carlin himself has pointed out, nothing is out of bounds anymore. What's profane and what's simply tasteless?

When you work in a newsroom with folks in their 20s and folks in their 70s, there can be a pretty big sensibility gap. That's one of the reasons we're trying to have some discussions about our standards and that we have agreement about where to draw the line.