Euphemisms of the NYT

In The New York Times yesterday:

“I’m not necessarily encouraging people to swear more,” Byrne writes, “but I do hope you might give it the respect it [expletive] deserves.”

In The New York Times today:

“My stuff,” he said (though he didn’t say “stuff”), “doesn’t work in the playoffs.”

It’d be nice if the Times could get its stuff together and figure out how to handle naughty words. The use of [expletive] is straightforwardly prim. I can’t object. But putting a word in quotation marks when it’s not what was spoken or written seems to me wildly inappropriate.

In previous posts, I’ve written about the Times sanitizing quotations from Philip Larkin and David Foster Wallace.