"There was a lady who left an angry voice mail," code enforcement officer Fran Calarco said. "And a man called and said he had small children and didn't think they should be exposed to that type of language. I told him I completely understood and agreed."
The offensive word?
Frickin'.
On a billboard advertising a sandwich — to be precise, a "crispy frickin' chicken" sandwich.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
BONUS LINK: Pre-web, all the way back in 1989, I did an interview with Ken Locke, a film editor at the BBC in London whose thankless task it was to excise dirty words from movies. Within the Beeb, he was widely if informally known as "the defucker." Luckily for me, Locke had a keen appreciation of the absurdities imposed by his job; he was a hilarious interviewee who relished explaining how, with the aid of voice actors, he'd replace coarse words on film soundtracks with similar-sounding euphemisms — substituting melonfarmer for motherfucker, for instance.
Years later, Boing Boing, then still a small zine instead of an insanely popular group blog, republished the piece. It's still a decent read, I think.
I guess I'm in part attached to it because, in a way, that article changed the course of my life. I lived in the Netherlands in 1989, where I worked as a freelance journalist, and had bumped into a guy called Louis Rossetto, an American who was the editor of a small Amsterdam-based English-language magazine called Electric Word. It was a cool publication about people who work with words for a living. I liked Louis, and after he asked me to keep him in mind for possible future contributions, I thought Electric Word might be a suitable outlet for the defucker piece. It was only the second English-language article I ever wrote (the first was a long interview with the Who's Pete Townshend that, despite my optimistic efforts, failed to get published in Rolling Stone — or anywhere beyond the Dutch borders).
Louis loved the defucker story and promptly published it. He was so taken with it that, after he moved back to the United States in 1991 and we lost touch for a couple of years, he used it in a dummy issue of a new magazine he was trying to get off the ground, about this new-fangled oddity most people had never heard of: the Internet. He showed that dummy — which, as I understand it, consisted of articles torn from other publications — to scores of potential investors. 
In early 1993, Louis and his partner Jane Metcalfe launched Wired, with modest seed capital. Wired, a virtual barometer of the digital Zeitgeist, fast became to an exploding class of hip, smart, creative geeks what Rolling Stone had been to counterculturally inspired music aficionados in the sixties and seventies.
I eventually came to work for both those magazines, and it was all on the back of that old defucker interview (that's because Louis invited me to write for Wired, an offer that became my passport into American journalism).
Apologies. I didn't mean to tell you my life's story, but there it is. A good chunk of it, anyway.
Now, I just realized that this means I've been writing about nannies and censors for two decades (actually, a quarter-century, truth be known). Fat lot of good it's done, as we seem to be more awash in pecksniffian faultfinders and offense-takers than ever.
The fight is just going to have to be its own reward.
Onwards.
Things like this constantly remind me of the uproar over the pet grooming company "High Maintenance Bitch" as I first heard about in your weblog from February of last year: http://www.bakelblog.com/nobodys_business/2007/02/bitching_about_.html
Posted by: Edward G. McKeown | Monday, March 03, 2008 at 10:59 AM