When Cee Lo Green released the brilliant video for his brilliant single “Fuck You” last summer, I tweaked the Times for its timidity in covering this viral phenomenon built around a “certain crude phrase.” Since then, I’ve been keeping an eye on the Times’s profanity policy, which is at its most absurd when the subject of the article is a four-letter word, as with Jenny Diski’s May 20th riff in the Times Magazine. “I demand it back: my word for my private part,” Diski wrote, but due to the paper’s standards, you had to guess that “cunt” was the word she was demanding.

Another example was Ben Brantley’s review of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Broadway play, which opened “under a title that cannot be printed in most daily newspapers,” the critic wrote. The Times printed the title as “The ____ With the Hat” (for those who play Hangman, that’s twelve underscores), and Brantley mostly referred to it as “Hat.” It has since been nominated for six Tony Awards, including best play.

In anticipation of Sunday night’s Tony Awards, I’d been gearing up to return to the theme of profanity in the Times. It’s not simply a prohibition in editorial space; the agency responsible for creating print and online display ads for the the play had to compromise; they went with a strikethrough instead of an underscore.

But I discovered, upon calling the publicists for the show, that its official title is in fact “The Motherf**ker With the Hat”; that’s what it says on the marquee. (The New Yorker’s review followed the official style, as did New York and Playbill; Variety and the Village Voice spelled out “Motherfucker.”) Those two asterisks look like pasties next to the Gray Lady’s burka, but it’s hard to blame a newspaper for censoring a word that the promoters of the show are already covering up.

Fortunately, the Times has been flooding the zone on “Go the Fuck to Sleep,” Adam Mansbach’s children’s book for frustrated parents that should be packaged as a companion volume to “14 Hours ‘Til Bedtime.” (The Times uses four horizontal lines, but it did run Richard Cortes’s cover illustration, in which the light of the full moon outshines the u and c in “Fuck.”)

Jeff Bezos must know the backers of “The Motherf**ker with the Hat,” since Amazon is calling the book “Go the F**k to Sleep.” And the search suggestions on Amazon’s search box also avoid “fuck”:

[#image: /photos/590953cac14b3c606c1042c6]

If you type in “Go the Fuck,” the search box offers no suggestions.

Ibrahim Ahmad, a senior editor at Akashic Books, which publishes “Go the Fuck to Sleep,” said he did not ask Amazon to mask the title of the book. Look at the Akashic site, he said.

Ahmad referred me to Jamie Starling, who handles Amazon for Akashic’s distributor, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution. “It’s kind of weird,” Starling said. “When I get reports from my Amazon vendor setup, it also has the asterisks in it.”

Starling said that her company also distributes “The Compleat Motherfucker: A History of the Mother of All Dirty Words” (Feral House) and Seth Tobocman’s “You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive,” and Amazon didn’t change either of those titles. And a search for “fuck” in Amazon’s books section yielded more than eleven thousand results. The fourth-most-relevant title was the Kindle-only title “How to Fuck Your Wife in the Ass.” It has only one review—a one-star review that is worth reprinting in its entirety:

This book continually shows up on my kindle even though i didnt buy it. I have had to get it removed from amazon support several times but it comes back.

There’s a Weinergate opening here, but I’ve already covered that.

More than half of the titles on the first few screens are available only as e-books. (“Go the Fuck to Sleep” is ranked twentieth in terms of relevance.) Perhaps this explains the Kindle’s popularity?

Jamie Starling of Consortium Book Sales and Distribution said the only explanation she could think of was that Amazon might treat high-ranking books differently. (As of this writing, “Go the Fuck to Sleep” is the number-one book on Amazon.) I used Amazon’s media inquiry form to ask them to explain, but did not receive a response yet; I will update this post if I get one.

I don’t want to write a blog post every time the Times doesn’t curse. The story doesn’t change much, and it’s hard to set Google Alerts to collect examples of an absence. But it’s worth keeping track—and I need your help. Please use the Twitter hashtag #fittoprint so we can keep a running catalog.