I appreciate all your thoughts on this topic. Although most of our readers haven’t been children for a long time, we do consider Classic Trains to be a family magazine, at least in terms of the language used. We also recognize that many adults do not care to be subjected to bad language in our pages – there’s enough of it everywhere else, as some of you noted. On the other hand, railroading is not a delicate business, and the air in crew rooms and engine cabs could be quite blue at times.
We approach the subject of even mild profanity with care. Some words we of course would never consider publishing. Others, such as those in the Bad Ride story, can get in, provided they contribute to the story and are not merely gratuitous. As author Ralph Podas knows, we edited his brother’s letter for length, clarity – and language. Although the brother did not use any language that was “worse” than what appeared in print, there were a number of mild profanities that we thought were unnecessary to the story and – by their sheer volume – potentially offensive to readers. This of course is no indictment of the brother, who never imagined his letter would someday be published.
It would be interesting indeed to see if some parent felt similarly if their child added that word to their vocabulary after reading the magazine in question. [2c]
Love, hate, war, water and air pollution, climate change and global warming, hunger, waste, ignorance, education, freedom, justice. The list goes on. Many things more worth worrying about than saving the world from words.
Long after the recent Classic Trains magazine article is gone and forgotten, great American rhetoric will remain with us. Excerpts from Classic Speeches of our three greatest Presidents who changed the world with their words.:
George Washington’s Farewell Address: Not unconscious, in the outset, of the inferiority of my qualifications, experience in my own eyes, perhaps still more in the eyes of others, has strengthened the motives to diffidence of myself; and every day the increasing weight of years admonishes me more and more, that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome. Satisfied, that, if any circumstances have given peculiar value to my services, they were temporary, I have the consolation to believe, that, while choice and prudence invite me to quit the political scene, patriotism does not forbid it.
If they did add that word they better look at the world around them and not a magazine that has a dedicated hobbiest following. Chances are he’s only looking at the pictures anyway. What don’t you understand, television, comic books, school classmates, walking through a mall, newspapers, a vice president using the F word, sport hero’s and their tweets, billboards, graffiti, and the list can go on. Blaming a magazine that has a following limited to those interested in that topic for simply quoting a line to get the feel of the story is as stated above, “Much ado about nothing”. I suggest you put your child in a cage and keep him away from life as it is. Is this revenge for your topic being closed when you totally disrespected law enforcement? Good role model Pops.
Classic Trains and their staff, keep up the good work on a great publication.
Just another opportunity to descend to the level of the least common denominator? If several children going to school with yours smoke crack, are you going to condone it as a pervasive evil as well?
Perhaps you should do your homework more thouroughly?
From Wiktionary: Profane (adj) to violate, to treat with abuse, irreverence, obloquy, or contempt; to desecrate; to pollute; as, to profane the name of God; to profane the Scriptures, or the ordinance of God; To put to a wrong or unworthy use-
Ok. Lets use this analogy you’ve posted. Let’s look at your “avatar” here, too. You are smoking a pipe. Lip and mouth cancer could result from smoking a pipe, so could throat and esophogal cancer as well as lung cancer. Second hand smoke is reportedly even more dangerous to you and to those around you. Any childeren who see your picture sucking on a poisonous,cancer causing tobacco smoke will assume you condone this dangerous practice? Should the lords of the internet here, therefore, demand you take down your picture?
Ya know, there come a point where you’ve got to trust yourself, your teachings, and those you taught your teachings. If your teachings have merit, integrety, and truth, then you need not worry how those you taught receive messages. If you don’t believe in yourself and your teachings, then you must start over beginning with yourself. The delecate balance of popular writing is to thread the needle so that what is written and published can communicate with as broad an audience as possible. One cannot expect to keep the attention and interest of the educated or of those learned in a given field while at the same time keeping words and ideas camaflouged so that a 5 year old isn’t “contaminated”. You can’t have it all ways and you can’t protect everybody all the time. The idea of reading is to learn new things and adnvace one as a human being. If one has been doctrinated i
From my vantage point of many years, I have noticed children do not react to things outside their usual realm.
Two examples. Back in 1965 while attending a company school (an 11 month one), my family came to live with me during the summer. The 12 year old daughter was reading a book, from off the shelf in the rental house. about a family raising tobacco in Connecticut. I looked at the book one evening and was concerned that there several adult themes besides the growing of tobacco. Since she didn’t seem immersed in the book, I didn’t say anything. But ten years later I asked her had the ‘adult themes’ concerned her. She was completely unaware of them; they hadn’t even triggered her curiousity!
Another example: The woman next door related that, while shopping, her 5 year old daughter started banging on the gum ball machine. The mother asked what was wrong. "I put a penny in this machine and danged thing won’t give me my gum!’ Now if she had used danged, her comment might have passed unnoticed but she had used the full blown profanity, a phrase the child’s father often used.
Children immitate their parents far more readily than what they see in the occasional advertisement or piece of literature.
And finally, the Navy had me singing ‘Don’t Give Up the Ship’, and the last line of that song is “If you have to take a lickin’, take it man and quit your bitchin’: DONT GIVE UP THE SHIP!” And I was just barely 18 years of age. You might say the Navy was quite insistent, and they got my attention.
I think if the word in question had to be struck, there would be other expressions that wouldn’t cut the mustard, either. We must be as careful to avoid slippery-slope censorship in either too liberal or too conservative a direction.
The term is quite common, and there are far worse. We can have an attempt at working-man’s realism, or we can impose the artificiality of 1940s Hollywood and its circumlocutions. But to say that the word degrades or corrupts tweens old enough to read it is an attempt at a socially pristine use of language which hasn’t held sway for decades
If a child (hypothetical) of mine ran across that word in a magazine, I’d probably be pleased s/he was reading something but if questioned, would mention that the word was not totally “nice” or universally acceptable. It certainly was a good use of “causal” cussing (driven to the wall) as opposed to “casual” cussing (peppering one’s speech with f-bombs and such).
The vocabulary I hear from the grade schoolers walking home from the local bus stop is far beyond anything that is being objected to on this forum. Parents may have the fantasy world of the 40’s in their minds as the acceptable level…the kids exist and function in the 21st Century reality. The ‘Father Knows Best’ world of the 50’s didn’t exist in reality then and certainly doesn’t exist in the 21st Century.
All well and good that some of you are offended and it’s not for me or anyone else to question your values in this format. HOWEVER, you do not speak or think for me which is what this kind of proposed censorship comes down to. The language was not gratuitous and entirely appropriate to the context of the story. If this is an egregious breach of good taste for you then vote with your wallet…but do not assume that you are going to select for all of us.
Concerning profanity in the magazine, or anywhere else for that matter: When I was 27 I would have said “what’s the big deal? Everybody talks like that!” Well now I’m 57 and it’s amazing what 30 years of living teach you. Eveybody DOESN’T talk like that and even if many of us do (I’m no innocent as far as that’s concerned) there’s still a time and a place for everything. Just remember, the printed page is a projectile you’re firing into the future with your name on it. What do you want someone to think about you 40, 50, or 100 years from now?
Keep in mind there was only one “swear word” (“damn”) used, which is generally considered to be a mild one and is allowed on TV and Radio every day. The other issue was a misunderstanding of the use of a slang term (“bitching”) which in this context means “complaining”.
True enough, but the term harkens back to a female dog who may be protective and vicious, which some men tend to use as a substitute for the influential women around them. Whether they are misogynists or not, the term is therefore derogatory, and ‘bitching’ means acting like a female…who tend to be vocal and complain more than men do.
Just because a term is widely used, and we all know which one is peppered freely in the current language of our youth, doesn’t make it right to do.
Then again, by exposing ourselves to things often enough, they become innocuous and in some cases lose their most damaging characteristics. I guess that’s not so bad.