The Wall Street Journal will now “allow the printing of most vulgarities,” the paper said in a blog post on Tuesday.
The new policy of printing curse words, however, has strict rules: “If they are in direct quotations and our news judgment is that the quotation is important to include because it gives insight into how the person communicates, his or her depth of feeling on a subject, or character.”
The Journal will “continue to use vulgarities quite sparingly and only in direct quotes, not in our own voice.” Still, some words still require a Barney dash, which is explained as “a long dash following the first letter of the obscenity, a style named after former Journal editor Barney Calame.”
Racial epithets, “f– or f–ing” and “c–” are listed as examples of word that still require the Barney dash. The Journal noted, “Editors and reporters should direct any questions to the Standards group.”
The Journal even managed to slip in a jab at GOP nominee Donald Trump when naming examples of acceptable curse words, “A politician (guess who) vowing to ‘bomb the shit’ out of Islamic State’s oil operations.”