Why Is “F—” Considered Unprintable?

It’s been nearly 30 years since James Baker, then President George Bush’s Secretary of State, made his memorable remark about America’s Jews (I quote from the Chicago Tribune of March 15, 1992), “— ’em! They didn’t vote for us.” Other versions had Baker saying, “They don’t vote for us anyway,” and different newspapers found different ways of truncating the f-word, but none of them spelled it out in full.

This was at a time in American history when taboos against the public use of f— had already been greatly eroded. Looking to the future, then, one might have expected that after three more decades in which English speakers would be regularly exposed to the once forbidden word in almost every conceivable form—in books, in magazines, in movies, in music lyrics, on television (though not on most commercial channels), on the Internet, on social media, in ordinary conversation between people who previously shunned it—f— would have its missing letters restored by the mainstream press. Yet what do we find when Donald Trump turns on Benjamin Netanyahu for the latter’s congratulatory message to Joe Biden on winning the 2020 election? “F⸺ him,” the Los Angeles Times had Trump saying. So did the Boston Globe. Bloomberg Businessweek spelled it “F- – -,” the British Independent “F***,” the Jewish Forward “F⸺k ,” and the Times of Israel “F*ck.” For them all, the whole word was as unprintable as ever.

One wonders why this is. After all, in our increasingly permissive age, other swear words had such restrictions done away with long ago. Newspaper usages like “h-ll” and “d—” disappeared by the mid-20th century. Even spellings like “sh– ,” “pr—,” and a–” have vanished from most major newspapers. The f-word alone continues to be partially censored.