Saturday, November 30, 2013

11/30/2013: The day the Omaha World-Herald published the word 'chickenshit' on the front page, above the fold

Quentin Crisp once opined that you should never try to keep up with the Joneses when it's so much easier to drag them down to your level, but we swear that our corrosive influence had nothing to do with any of this, as we detect only occasional visits from them, presumably when they Google themselves to see what cranky bloggers saying about them.
     We at AKSARBENT (well, some of us) hope elderly former CEO Harold Andersen didn't get his Saturday paper before he got his morning coffee. The rest of us can tell our grandchildren we witnessed the evolutionary event. We're not criticizing the Herald, we're merely amused.
     Publication of the colorful vulgarity was more than justified by its news value and perfectly defensible, no matter what usual rules of decorum prevail in the paper's newsroom.
     The utterer, Bo Pelini, in hot water again because of his hot temper and a loss to Iowa, yelled at a ref over a pass interference call, which elicited another penalty, against NU's head coach himself, for unsportsmanlike conduct. Later, Pelini was "terse" with an ABC reporter at halftime and swore at a postgame press conference. His vocational future at Nebraska looks thickly overcast.
     Here at AKSARBENT, we think, when called for, i.e., when a blue word is more than peripheral to the story, you should always use the complete, unmodified term in question and never an allusion with asterisks or underscores.

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