For Better or for Worse

[Jonathan Lighter]

For proof, check out "ball-bearing WAC" in HDAS.

JL

"Mullins, Bill" <Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Mullins, Bill"
Subject: Re: For Better or for Worse
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I've been doing some biographical research on Robert A. Heinlein late.
As part of it, I ran across some comments about _Astounding Science
Fiction_, the pulp that published much of his early work. They censored
_everything_ that was remotely dirty, and apparently writers would make
a game of getting stuff in. I read about alien names that were phonetic
matches for foreign cuss words, and reference to a "ball bearing rat
catcher" (nominally, a device that includes ball bearings, but the
in-joke was that it was a tomcat, i.e., it bears balls).


>
> Good for her! Media censors are so crazy these days that the
> only way to talk about anything may be to make it up. If a
> censor challenged this, she could double dare him: "Okay, if
> you think I'm using vulgar language, what does it mean?"
>
>


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