A special bonus post. This was something that occurred to me while I was working on the Hyperloop post. I tried to fit it in, but it just wasn’t working, so you get it as a side dish.

I was a bit startled to see that Businessweek quoted Elon Musk’s use of the word “fucking” in full.

I’ll grant that Businessweek isn’t exactly a staid, stogy venue. I’ll even grant that this was on the web rather than in print, but it still surprised me.

It turns out though, that this isn’t the first time that word has appeared under their title. Quite the contrary, in fact. A check via Google shows over 14,000 hits for “fucking” on businessweek.com.

I did a quick sampling to get a sense of how many of those hits are in reader comments as opposed to actual articles, and came up with about a 50/50 split. I suspect that’s skewed, but even if we assume it’s 90% reader comment, that’s still a lot of fucking going on in Businessweek.

Am I really that far out of the loop, or does this surprise anyone else? Has the word really lost that much of its power to shock?

Where’s it going to turn up next? The New York Times (6,190 hits)? USA Today (1050 hits)? The Wall Street Journal (572 hits)?

Sigh.

People, can we raise the level of discourse just a smidgeon? Please?