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[Expletive]
Happens
By Thurston Domina
It's the most famous sentence I've been involved in and, although my role in its creation was minimal, I'm pretty proud of it: "[Expletive] in, [expletive] out. If you take in [expletive] and turn out [expletive] that is slightly more literate, you're still left with [expletive]."
The words aren't at all mine. They belong to Allen Lee Sessoms, president of Queens College, one of the more prestigious colleges in the City University of New York system. Sessoms uttered them at a meeting he held with my boss, four Queens College administrators and myself on Sept. 9. All I did was dutifully transcribe them in my notebook as they came streaming out of his mouth, transfer them from the notebook to a memorandum about the meeting, and cut and paste from that memorandum into a policy report that I helped research and write, taking care to replace the four-letter words with the less expressive, but less incendiary "[expletive]."
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In These Times ©
1999
Vol. 24, No. 3 |