Daniel Lord was an American Jesuit whose lasting legacy was probably (at least jointly) the Production Code aka the Hays Code which (arguably) hobbled the American film industry for decades; swearing was just one of the things it prohibited (indeed, it was the very first thing outlawed in Will Hays’ original 1927 list of “Don’ts”), and evidently it vexed Lord enough that in 1943 he wrote a whole pamphlet about it. Notice that this is clearly a British edition of it, so I wonder if he had to adapt it to local tastes in profanity…
Anyway, I’m kind of amused to have found this after also recently discovering this delightful document on a related note from 1898; for all that people complain about sledging in cricket in modern times, particularly by Australian cricketers, clearly American baseball players were way ahead of them, to the point where one of the sport’s top executives wrote this letter with examples of the bad words currently in use… but what makes it hilarious is the “UNMAILABLE” notice at the end, because the thing contained enough profanity that if they’d mailed it and it had been intercepted for some reason they could’ve been up on an obscenity charge…
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