The latest trend in titles? We can't print it.
If Mark Twain once said that every household should have a room to swear in, these days the habit is completely out of the closet. From HBO to hip-hop, good old American cussin' has become so commonplace we hardly notice anymore.
It's so prevalent, in fact, that four-letter words are no longer simply popping up in movies, TV, and chart-topping songs -- they're right up there in boldface on the marquee, in the very titles we scan on store shelves and advertisements.
This weekend, for example, the Independent Film Festival of Boston will screen a documentary named after a four-letter word for sexual intercourse. The title is hardly gratuitous. The film is a semi-serious exploration of the combative word and its place in public discourse, from the vice president's infamous use of it on the Senate floor in 2004 to its unavoidable presence in contemporary American culture.
The film, directed by Steve Anderson, is also just one example of a rapidly expanding list of works that flaunt their verbal rebellion right in their titles. In recent weeks, hip-hop group the Beastie Boys released a concert film titled (without the expletive) ''Awesome; I . . . Shot That!" And ''Another . . . Night in Suck City," a 2004 memoir by Boston writer Nick Flynn, is slated to be made into a feature film of the same name.
When Jon Stewart welcomed Princeton's Harry Frankfurt onto ''The Daily Show" last year to discuss the philosophy professor's best-selling book ''On Bull. . .," the glee was palpable. The audience's laughter, Stewart explained, was directly attributable to repeated references to the book's title.
''It tickles them," Stewart told his guest. ''They love the word."
It certainly gets your attention. Putting an expletive in a title almost guarantees an audience, says Timothy Jay, a psychology professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams and the author of ''Cursing in America."
''You have this surprise factor," says the professor, who appears as a commentator in the new documentary.''F---." ''Odd sticks out, and that's great for marketing and advertising."
If there is a proliferation of such titles these days, Jay says, we can chalk it up to the imitative nature of the entertainment industry. ''If one person does it and it catches on, everyone is going to do it until it doesn't work anymore."
The very title of the new documentary, which features appearances by Bill Maher, Chuck D, the late Hunter S. Thompson and other cultural incendiaries, is a transparent invitation to a debate, says Mark Urman, head of the theatrical division of New York City distributors ThinkFilm. It's provocative, not crude for the sake of being crude.
''This is a smart, upmarket film," he says. ''It's wise, witty, imaginative. We want to bump the edges of the envelope in a playful way. It's not our job to cause anybody pain, or lower the standards of society or be vulgar."
Such a prominently placed expletive would have been unheard of in earlier generations, though the 1960s and early '70s provided a few cultural landmarks. Andy Warhol originally named his ''Blue Movie" for the sex act his subjects performed on camera. Robert Frank's 1972 Rolling Stones tour documentary gained instant infamy with its defiant title, which featured a 10-letter sexual obscenity. In literature, iconoclast Kurt Vonnegut published a short story with the same four-letter profanity for intercourse in its title.
But the practice, once underground almost by definition, has recently become routine. Bookstores are suddenly inundated with titles echoing Frankfurt's, a couple of them examining corporate life. The Capitol Records roster includes a pop-punk group called the F-Ups, while a Toronto band shares a name with a hot sauce. Let's just say both include the word ''holy."
Such blatant use of profanity still has the power to make retailers nervous. The 2002 publication of Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy's book ''Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word" raised eyebrows at
But the online bookseller has gotten relatively few complaints about such titles. ''I'm sure we do get them," Smith says, ''but nobody in customer service can recall one offhand." People may simply be growing more immune to raw language, she says.
Jill Bialosky, who edited Flynn's crudely titled memoir at W.W. Norton & Company, says the phrase inspired little controversy.
''We didn't feel any sort of resistance in the marketplace," she says. ''In fact, it was the opposite. People were intrigued."
Urman, whose company distributes the Beastie Boys documentary as well as Anderson's documentary, points out that the latter film will play to an art-house audience comprising, presumably, adults also intrigued by the social ramifications of the word.
''It won't be playing at the multiplexes," he says. ''People will have to go out of their way to pretend that this movie offends them."
He says he is already relishing the prospect of placing a big ad in The New York Times when the documentary is officially released later this year. Half-joking, he says he might use empty quotes, with no title at all. ''In many respects that's a liberal, open-minded paper," says Urman, ''but they have a very stringent attitude about language."
Newspapers and magazines, Urman says, vary in their lenience toward obscenities, from the typical alternative weekly's liberal use of them to most major dailies' reluctant, dash- or ellipses-filled references -- the equivalent of a censor's bleeps. He is presently designing an ad in which the number of dashes will be expandable and contractable, ''like a pearl necklace," depending on how many letters a particular publication will allow.
Those decisions don't always fall neatly across the political spectrum. ''The New York Post, which is extremely conservative politically, will probably let me use three of the four letters," Urman says.
However the film is received, Urman is confident that its title is justified. ''We're not just dropping the F-bomb on America," he says. But even if some perceived it that way, would there be much hand-wringing?
Jay, for one, believes that rude words are among the least of our worries. ''There is no evidence that this kind of language harms anybody," he says. ''Everyone knows how to swear. It's like the horn in your car -- everyone has one, whether you use it or not."
James Sullivan can be reached at jassullivan@earthlink.net. 
