Different Shades Of Red

In my last column, some readers may have noticed, there was a word that I actually didn't write. The word I did write disappeared somewhere, down the drain, wherever RAM goes when you turn the computer off. Apparently that word can only appear on a news page if it's in a direct quote, and quoting myself doesn't seem to be an option. So that it would not be missed, it was conveniently replaced by "fornicate with." I think the sutures showed.

After calling my editor and telling him to go fornicate with himself, I deciphered why I was so upset. I have issues with censorship. In high school I wanted to recite a poem in a competition. It was a damn good poem ("The Colonel" by Carolyn Forche, if anyone's interested), and a poem that I thought might reach people in a school where poetry meant being taught Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" every two years. But this poem, otherwise well-behaved, had one word to which they objected; coincidentally, it was exactly the same word that was excised from my column two weeks ago.

Most of the people I talked to about this suggested I change the word slightly, to something like "fornicate," "screw" or translate it into Spanish, so that I would at least be able to recite the rest of the poem. But the choice of that specific word was important to me, and presumably to the author of the poem, and that choice was made even more important when the word carries enough impact that people are afraid to hear it.

I actually didn't swear at all in high school; I never used that particular word in casual conversation or scrawled it on bathroom stalls. I didn't want overuse to dim the impact of that word in case I ever needed it. But in (good) writing, words are sacred, and each one counts, and each one is there for a reason.

Well-meaning teachers shook their heads and told me to choose my battles. I've chosen.

So my little high when people told me they liked my last column crashed and burned when they asked, with a puzzled look on their face, "Fornicate-with-me red?" I can't blame them. I mean, come on, there are just too many syllables. It's awkward, it's not clean, it doesn't create the right image. People who rename nailpolish colors for their provocative tendencies don't use words like "fornicate" (okay, maybe they do if they're Harvard students, but I didn't).

It's not like Harvard students don't swear. It's not as if four-letter words don't pervade our society, from movies to radio to the sounds of the street. Even a few Harvard professors have been known to slip when the Science Center projectors crash yet again.

The important thing is that the column was better the way I wrote it. People would have liked it more. Or they would have written entertaining letters to the editor about why they didn't like it. Either way, it would have been more true.

I fumed. I got over it. I still care about the point.

"The point is," I explained to my roommate for the nth time, "that censorship is wrong."

"It's okay," she said. "All you have to do is figure out a way to get the word 'fuck' into your next column."