Bleeping Blagojevich

The use of the expression "bleeping" to stand in for profanity has reached a fever pitch with the arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich.  In fact it's gone beyond that, it's a bleeping epidemic. 

Okay I got mine in, now let me complain about it.  Of course it all started with U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's press conference.  You really have to watch that clip to appreciate the awkwardness of how he handles the expletives: "quote - those are his words not our characterization, other than with regard to the bleep".  He has to explain to the audience (which is the entire nation) that Blagojevich didn't actually say the word "bleep".

First of all, if you read the actual criminal complaint issued against Blagojevich, you'll see that they really do use the word 'fuck' where he said 'fuck', 'shit' where he said 'shit and 'fucking' where he said 'fucking'.  There is none of this "[expletive]" crap when you're making a case to indict a Governor.  So when Attorney Fitzgerald used the word "bleeping" to stand in for "fucking" in the press conference, it was his call to do so.

Okay so you're going on national television to announce the arrest of a Governor - it's probably smart to watch your mouth, so let's give Fitzgerald credit.  He obviously didn't have time to think about the linguistic implications of what he was doing, since he was busy trying to put a corrupt Governor in jail.

Still, we all know what word he is covering up with the "bleep".  That's the point of saying "bleep-ing" for "fucking" instead of just "bleep" - it's so we know that he was saying "fucking" instead of "fuck".  And if we feel strongly enough about clarity that we want everyone to be able to tell whether our censored profanity is finite or non-finite, isn't it pretty silly that we dance around a word that no longer even has a profane context?

But more specifically, why'd Fitzgerald choose to say "bleeping"?  When words are censored in print we often use symbols: $#@% or ****ing, etc.   Sometimes they print [censored] or [expletive deleted] as an explanation of what has happened to the word that was really there.  But in spoken conversation, we can't pronounce symbols in any meaninfgul way and to say "censored" or "expletive deleted" doesn't make any sense because in print they are letting us know what happened in the past - the editor came along and removed the word from the text - but in real-time spoken conversation, the deletion is happening right here and now, so the past tense doesn't work and there are no brackets to denote that it is an editor speaking (unless you are Victor Borge).  So on television we get the bleep, and the onomotopaeia of the bleep takes its place in conversation without technical assistance.

What annoys me about "bleeping" isn't just the bowdlerization of media (which is stupid), it's that it's washed over into innapropriate formats.  In the December 22nd issue of Time Magazine. the article "Governor Gone Wild" the big text quote next to the big photo of Blagojevich reads:

'I've got this thing, and it's [bleeping] golden. I'm just not giving it up for [bleeping] nothing.' -Governor Rod Blagojevich, on a wiretap

However, in the actual body of the article, Time chooses to print it like so:

"I've got this thing, and it's f______ golden," he told an aide a day after the November elections on a home phone that was tapped by the FBI. "I'm just not giving it up for f______ nothing."

The discrepancy in how the profanity is covered up in a single article in a single publication is weird.  First off, how can "[bleeping]" possibly be appropriate in a text format?  There was no bleep, the man said 'fucking' and a print editor decided not to print it.  The word was never bleeped out (except for by Fitzgerald).  It bugs me that Time went with a colloquial method of indicating profanity, because if we're going to be informal why not just print the real word? Second, Time chooses to preserve the '-ing' (albeit in brackets) in the first instance, but opts to drop it in the second in favor of the single 'f' followed by a blank.  So f and ing are okay, but not uck?  I find the lack of editorial consistency and appropriateness more offensive than the word 'fucking'. 

Are children in danger of reading the Time magazine article about Governor Blagojevich and being exposed to the word "fucking"?  If a kid is taking an interest in the corruption scandals of Illinois politics, I think they can handle the expletive.

And so it seems we are doomed to have to listen to so-called news anchors saying things like "The Governor told his aide that, quote "Candidate 5 can go bleep himself in the bleep-hole with his bleeping offer, and then bleep it out onto a platter and eat it."  Except they he didn't say bleep, bleep-hole, bleeping or bleep."  Perhaps after a few months of that we'll all be ready for some actual fucking quotation.