By Harmeet Kaur, CNN
(CNN) — President Trump opened Easter Sunday with a florid threat toward Iran, decked in profanities and obscenities.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
There was a lot for journalists to analyze in Trump’s statement: He vowed to inflict suffering, threatened to commit war crimes and mocked Muslims on the holiest day for Christians. But in reporting on the remarks, the news media was confronted with another, more narrow issue: how to address the president’s use of “Fuckin’.”
“Fuckin’” is a colloquial shortening of the present participle of the verb “fuck,” which comes from the Germanic languages — though it’s unclear which language specifically, the lexicographer and linguist Jesse Sheidlower writes in “The F-Word.” His book notes that the English word is related to Dutch, German and Swedish words meaning “to copulate” or “to move back and forth.” In the 14th century, it appeared for the first time in court records about a man named Roger Fuckebythenavele. A subsequent, non-name appearance in the 15th century is obscured by a cipher, Sheidlower writes, suggesting that it was strongly taboo.
The ambiguity around the word’s origins stems at least partly from a centuries-long moral panic over it, says Michael Adams, an English professor at Indiana University Bloomington who has written about swearing. The word was considered so vulgar that it was left out of early dictionaries and was rarely printed, though Adams says people were certainly using it. Originally used in sexual senses, by the late 1800s, it had become an intensifier — as in, “fucking hell” or, later, “abso-fucking-lutely.”
“It’s a word that’s had a private life and not a public one,” Adams says. “And now it has a public one as well.”
Today, the word and its variants are ubiquitous and less taboo than ever. They are deployed for emphasis or humor, as well as to express shock, anger, frustration or even joy, as when Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu turned to the camera and microphone and declared “That’s what I’m fuckin’ talkin’ about!” after the performance that won her the gold medal.
Despite such widespread use, major news organizations still refrain from publishing or airing profanity except in rare cases. For primetime rebroadcast, NBC cut out Liu’s audio between “I’m” and “talkin’.”
When is profanity essential to a story? The president of the United States using it publicly to threaten Iran appears to be one such case. But while “Fuckin’” appeared in online articles largely as Trump expressed it, it was at times censored and uncensored on TV.
Most major news organizations avoided putting it in print and digital headlines, opting for broad characterizations such as “curse-filled” or “expletive-laden.” The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal also wrote around the word in their print stories, though The Washington Post included it in full. Still, most outlets used the word plainly in the body of their online stories: CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC all ran it uncensored, though the BBC prefaced the quote with a bolded disclaimer about strong language. NPR’s write-up censored it as “F***in’.” The Associated Press omitted the word entirely.
On CNN, news anchors reading Trump’s post on air said both “Fuckin’” and “effing.” News chyrons that day also featured both censored and uncensored forms.
A CNN spokesperson said “We won’t be able to expound on this as we typically don’t discuss editorial decision making.”
MS NOW’s Eugene Daniels read the word on air and the post was shown uncensored, though “F**kin’” was used for the chyron. Fox News’ Peter Doocy warned viewers that Trump’s post “has some really bad words in it,” and proceeded to read it aloud, substituting “F-word” for the real thing.
Trump has forced news outlets to confront similar questions before. In 2018, in an Oval Office meeting with lawmakers, he asked why the US was taking in people from “shithole countries,” referring to African countries and Haiti. The Washington Post, which broke the news, ran the offending word in both its headline and story. “When the president says it, we’ll use it verbatim,” Martin Baron, then executive editor of the Washington Post, told the Washingtonian at the time.
But that hasn’t always been the policy in US newsrooms. US presidents across history have been known to use profanity, but their remarks weren’t generally reported on in newspapers even if reporters knew about them, says Ralph Hanson, communication professor at the University of Nebraska Kearney. Lyndon B. Johnson’s reputation as a foul-mouthed president, for example, only became public afterward through historical accounts and White House recordings. That norm changed somewhat during Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, when transcripts of White House recordings revealed his penchant for swearing. But the actual curse words were replaced with [EXPLETIVE DELETED], which became a national punchline.
When presidents and vice presidents have been caught swearing in hot mic moments, news organizations have covered the remarks with varying degrees of clarity. In 2004, when Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly told Sen. Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor to “fuck himself,” The Washington Post printed the remark verbatim. The New York Times reported that Cheney “used an obscene phrase to describe what he thought Mr. Leahy should do.” A few years later, George W. Bush was caught on tape at a dinner in Russia telling Prime Minister Tony Blair that Hezbollah should “stop doing this shit.” The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post were among those that printed the word; others censored it with asterisks or dashes. In Barack Obama’s first term, CNN and other outlets reported that Vice President Joe Biden called the passage of the Affordable Care Act a “big f**king deal.” The New York Times substituted ellipses: “Mr. President, this is a big … deal,” he said, adding an adjective between the big and the deal that begins with “f.”
Unlike previous presidents, though, Trump chose to deliver the word in an official communication.
If there was ever a notion that profanity isn’t befitting of the nation’s highest office, that standard has largely eroded. In today’s political communication, profanity is seen as a mark of authenticity. Kamala Harris occasionally used swear words for emphasis — she advised young people to “kick that fucking door down” and reportedly told Democratic governors that rallying around Biden was about “saving our fucking democracy.” Since Trump first ran for president, he has publicly said just about every major swear word, and many of his supporters admire his rhetoric as a welcome departure from political correctness.
Trump did not spell out the word in full in his post, instead opting to lop off the final G. That is often how it is pronounced when spoken, due to the linguistic phenomenon of elision, in which a speaker drops a sound in a word or a phrase. But to stylize the word this way in text struck Adams as an odd formality: “If you’re gonna go, why not go all the way and just say ‘fucking’ and get it over with?”
Some lexicographers and language scholars apply the same logic to censored profanity. In 2014, Sheidlower made “The Case For Profanity In Print” in the opinion pages of The New York Times: “At a time when readers can simply go online to find the details from more nimble upstarts willing to be frank, the mainstream media need to accurately report language that is central to their stories,” he wrote.
Adams, perhaps unsurprisingly given that he wrote a book titled “In Praise of Profanity,” agrees. “The paradox of putting the asterisks in is that you’re trying to erase the force of the word, but everybody who looks at it has to translate it into the word,” he says. “It’s convenient if you don’t think it’s right to swear publicly, to use a euphemism, but you’re really making other people swear in their minds. It’s like transferring the swearing responsibility to the reader instead of to the author, the publisher.”
Though some news organizations have indicated that their audiences want certain profanities obscured, other news consumers say they want the unvarnished truth. In cases when news organizations have paraphrased or used euphemisms instead of presenting what Trump actually said, critics have accused them of “sanewashing.”
Trump commanding Iran to “Open the Fuckin’ Strait” is not his most extreme statement in recent days — there was a case to be made it was not even the most offensive part of the post in which it appeared, given that it accompanied threats of violence to civilian targets and an apparent piece of Muslim-baiting. On Tuesday morning, as his self-imposed deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz approached, Trump wrote on Truth Social that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Shortly before the deadline, he agreed to stand down.
As Trump’s threats to Iran grew more and more extreme, fretting about whether to publish or air his use of a swear word seemed trivial. The president, for his part, seemed to agree.
On Monday, a reporter asked him why he used such vulgar language. “Only to make my point,” Trump replied. “I think you’ve heard it before.”
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