Bert Kelly's Jaz Band

[Jonathan Lighter]

I don't think it does.  In 1915 the practice of expurgating words in U.S.
newspapers was dead  - at least in my reading experience.  If a word was
unprintable, no part of it would be printed.  This was true for decades. I
believe the use of dashes came back slowly, beginning ca1970.

JL

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: Bert Kelly's Jaz Band
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 9/15/2010 10:03 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >Not so fast, George.  Nice people who associated the innovation "jazz"
> >(perhaps correctly) with the naughty sense of "jasm" would have thought it
> >pretty shocking. (Not-nice people who made the association would have
> >laughed and ignored it.)
> >
> >I suspect their numbers were not negligible.  Of course the absence of
> even
> >one editorial comment decrying the currency of the word, rather than the
> >music, undermines this argument.
>
> Doesn't the absence of *** or --- also undermine that argument?  Or
> were all newspaper editors in the 1910s not-nice people?  (Possibly
> related to my question about the commonness of such elisions in the
> early 20th century.)
>
> Joel
>
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