Here’s the thing I like about the Grauniad: when they run the story headlined BBC Radio 4 rapped over ‘cox sackers’ on-air comment, they feel very comfortable actually detailing the complaint:
The trust’s editorial complaints unit agreed, saying the phrase was “not articulated clearly enough and could easily have been misheard for the offensive word ‘cocksuckers’ by the majority of the audience”.
It said it was “highly likely to have been misheard by a significant part of the audience as ‘cocksuckers’”, many of whom might have been children because it was broadcast at 4.15pm when parents were doing the school run.
It is difficult to imagine the New York Times being able to report on the story at all.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
When Penn used to talk about his and Teller’s Showtime TV show “Bullshit!” on his radio show, he (presumably on the advice of various lawyers and such) would pronounce it “bulls hit”, with a hand-clap in the middle, because just saying “bulls hit” might be too racy (even though “bulls hit” sound basically nothing like “bullshit”).
Hmm, in that previous comment, I’d meant to say
> would pronounce it “bulls *clap* hit”
but I used angle-brackets instead of asterisks around the “clap”, so it got eaten as some sort of weird HTML tag.