Excessive profanity in books

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Joebill

You could show a pregnant woman on television in the 1950s.

What you couldn't say was 'she is pregnant'.

What you could say was 'she is with child'.

And it was Johnny Carson on his version of The Tonight Show.

I'm pretty sure Lucille Ball said it in words close to what I posted. In the early 50s, it was the rule at CBS, home to I Love Lucy, that pregnant women couldn't be shown on television.

From Wikipedia:

On July 17, 1951, one month before her fortieth birthday and after several miscarriages, Ball gave birth to her first child, Lucie Désirée Arnaz. A year and a half later, Ball gave birth to her second child, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV, known as Desi Arnaz, Jr. When he was born, I Love Lucy was a solid ratings hit, and Ball and Arnaz wrote the pregnancy into the show (indeed, Ball gave birth in real life on the same day that her Lucy Ricardo character gave birth). There were several challenges from CBS, insisting that a pregnant woman could not be shown on television, nor could the word "pregnant" be spoken on-air. After approval from several religious figures[who?] the network allowed the pregnancy storyline, but insisted that the word "expecting" be used instead of "pregnant".

From the Wikipedia article on Desi Arnez:

Arnaz also pushed the network to allow them to show Lucille Ball while she was pregnant. According to Arnaz, the CBS network told him, "You cannot show a pregnant woman on television". Arnaz consulted a priest, a rabbi, and a minister, all of whom told him that there would be nothing wrong with showing a pregnant Lucy or with using the word pregnant. The network finally relented and let Arnaz and Ball weave the pregnancy into the story line, but remained adamant about eschewing use of pregnant, so Arnaz substituted expecting, pronouncing it 'spectin' in his Cuban accent. Oddly, the official titles of two of the series' episodes employed the word pregnant: "Lucy Is Enceinte," employing the French word for pregnant, and "Pregnant Women Are Unpredictable," although the episode titles never appeared on the show itself.

See also http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Lucille_Ball

[Joebill]

Probably they both said it.

I don't think he said it in the 1950s, now that I think more on it.

He probably said it after the word pregnant was allowed to be spoken on teevee and he was talking about the early days.

Much of the 'standards' back then was Craziness disguised as concern.

[Avarwen]

Originally Posted by TGS

Hasn't "bitch" be reclaimed by some women as an acronym of "babe in total control of herself"?

Haven't heard that one. But the word bitch was "reclaimed" by women. Mainly because of how the word was sometimes used. Bitch can either mean a woman with a really nasty attitude or in the "reclaimed" version a woman who refuses to take shit form others (mainly men).

[Ravensknight]

I just stopped reading a book, One Day on Mars by Travis Taylor, because there just strings upon strings of profanity. As others have stated, it makes me wonder about the author's imagination...

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I'm pretty sure Lucille Ball said it in words close to what I posted. In the early 50s, it was the rule at CBS, home to I Love Lucy, that pregnant women couldn't be shown on television.

Some time around 10-12 years back I was flipping around through radio stations and heard some elderly preacher (don't know if he was local or syndicated) railing about the decaying morality of the modern age-- and he spent some time ranting about how horrible it was that pregnant women today thought that it was perfectly okay to walk around in public, when back in his day women knew that they should stay at home and hide their shame (and he wasn't talking about "unwed mothers"-- it was all pregnant women.)

[Worldwalker]

Someone clearly needed to point out to him that he was the son of a pregnant woman. If it's shameful to be pregnant, it's certainly shameful to be him.