Another Testy Copy Editors thread becomes a debate over putting profanity in the paper. The fact that it’s happening so often these days suggests we’re nearing a critical mass on the issue of printing “family” newspapers. When the family’s everyday language begins to contain “sucks,” “piss,” “shit” and “fuck,” how long can we hold back the ocean? One poster points out that dirtying up our langauge is hardly a sane strategy for wooing young readers, but the counterargument is that the staid langauge of our pages is shooing them away. I think the knots we twist ourselves into to avoid bad language make us look vaguely ridiculous, but I recognize that people look to us to establish boundaries, and throwing out the boundaries leads to chaos. But then again, the chaos of cleaning up people’s quotes every day is starting to take its toll as well.