A nice Norman Mailer story I hadn’t heard before, related to my Tuesday

column: “Derb—As to that great poseur Norman Mailer, and his ‘liberation’

of language: In The Naked and the Dead, all his characters use, and

frequently, the word ‘fug.’ In the flush of literary success, Mailer was at

a party, at which he was introduced to Dame Edith Sitwell. Upon being

introduced, Dame Edith said: ‘Oh, yes, you’re the young man who can’t spell

[pop].’”

Reminds me of a piece that appeared in the eminently respectable British

humor magazine Punch at the time of the Lady Chatterly trial. (Penguin

books had published D.H. Lawrence’s dirty-words novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and were tried for issuing an obscene publication.) The piece was a

spoof of the obscene passages in LCL, with the gamekeeper saying things

like: “There’s quite a fug in here,” and “Such a beautiful

countryside!”……