I saw the F-word in the New York Times on Sunday, at least it was in my copy, and I don’t mean “fake,” and it was spelled out, all four letters, as posted online by the Commander in Chief in his early morning harangue against Iran, and though he considers the Times fake news, the White House hasn’t denied that he wrote it.
The Times didn’t use dashes to soften the shock for their younger readers but spelled out the word, I think, in order to convey the tone of the post, which the Times described as “blistering” but which most readers would describe as insane. If you got a note from your neighbor saying “you’ll be living in hell,” you’d call the cops and they’d come.
An evangelical preacher might say “living in hell” from the pulpit but he wouldn’t use the F-word with it. This was after the Easter luncheon at which an evangelist compared the Boss to Jesus Christ and the look on the Boss’s face was priceless: he tried to look modest but he looked quite pleased. This was the lunch at which he said, “If I were king, I could do a lot more.”
