Profanity, obscenity & the media : being a second volume, wherein the language of journalism is examined, its splendours and miseries, including clichès and trivia, sensationalism and prurience, wit and witlessness, fiction and faction, pseudery and jabberwocky, scoops and hoaxes, racism and sexism, profanity and obscenity, virtue and reality, culture and anarchy - and the abuse of slang, style, and the habits of writing good prose / Melvin J. Lasky.

Introduction -- Part 1. Towards a Theory of Journalistic Malpractice -- 1. From A. N. Whitehead to Irving Kristol -- Illusions and Self-Deception -- Hard Facts and Soft Future -- Adversarial Culture -- "Sensations": From Silent Images to Talking Picture -- Art News and New Art -- Of Nihilism and Mendacity -- 2. The Little Lie and the Big Story -- Hitler's Hoax -- The Counterfeiter's Fiction -- Mysteries of the Piltdown Forgery -- 3. Difficulties in Grappling with Reality -- The Reporter Rearranges the Scene -- Janet Cooke and the Color of Truth -- The Duping of Hersh's "Camelot" -- Martin Walser's "Catechism of Correctness" -- 4. The New Shamanism -- Part 2. Sex and Other Ongoing Titillations -- 5. The Ennui of Obscenity -- Between Sexual Virility and Erotic Fatigue -- Low Notes in High C -- A-Word to S-Word, and their Synonyms -- Of Ideology and Scatology -- The Snafu Known as Swag -- Filling Out the Missing Details -- Private Parts, Public Lives -- Alphabet Soup -- Mr. Bloomberg's "$!*@&" -- 6. "O Propheta" -- The Last Refuge -- Porno Ploys and Crackable Codes -- A*c*c*o*m*p*l*i*c*e*s, or: Participatory Obscenity -- Steiner and Burgess On "Love" -- 7. Chaucer and a Choice of Taboo Words -- 8. Strong Odors, Blurred Pictures -- 9. Obsessions with the S-Word -- 10. The Case of the Missing F**r-L****r Word -- 11. Asterisks: From Byron to Madonna -- 12. Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad F-Word? -- 13. Tiger, the Times, and a Dreaded Black Asterisk -- 14. Morphing the A-Word -- 15. Terms of Agreement and Endearment -- 16. The Mergenthaler Option -- 17. A Matter of Illegitimacy -- 18. The Guard that Failed -- 19. The Desperate Search for "the Good Bits" -- Sporting Language -- Tom Jones and the Language Police -- 20. Swearing is the Curse -- Part 3. Literary Origins and Popular Consequences -- 21. Sources of Malpractice -- 22. From Wordsworth to Orwell and Hemingway -- 23. The Prose We Write and Speak -- 24. Dealing with the Grandmother Tongue -- The Continuing Domestication of Yiddishisms -- Leo Rosten's Gallimaufry -- 25. Quotations that were Unquoted -- 26. Dirty Realism in the White House and Beyond -- 27. Towards a Vocabulary of Pop Diplomacy -- Notes -- Index.

Machine converted from AACR2 source record.