Foresworn: Jonathan Lethem, Kenneth Tynan, and the unpredictable progress of swearing

For a few days last week, it seemed that Jonathan Lethem had achieved something unique: he had become the first person to use a particular four-letter word – the one beginning with F – in the New York Times. (Sensitive readers should be warned that I will stop using euphemisms after this sentence.) ‘I’m delighted,’ he told Salon’s Laura Miller, who spotted the transgression in an editor’s note to the paper’s glossy style magazine. ‘If I’d had the foresight to make it one of my life’s aspirations, I’d have done so. Instead it lands as dumb luck. My UK friend Dan Fox pointed out that it puts me with John Cleese, the first person to say “shit” on the BBC.’

Almost. There’s now a correction at the bottom of Laura Miller’s story, pointing out that the Grey Lady had the word several times back in 1998, when it printed the unexpurgated text of the