From Norman Mailer's 'Fug' to Trump's Oval Office
Jug Suraiya's June 2026 Economic Times op-ed on the normalization of profanity, framed by the famous 'fug' bowdlerization of The Naked and the Dead and the apocryphal Tallulah Bankhead exchange. An about-Mailer clipping; Mailer anchors the lede but the column's real subject is the loosening of the Overton window in public speech.
Jug Suraiya. “From Norman Mailer’s ‘Fug’ to Trump’s Oval Office: How a Four-Letter Word Conquered the English Language.” The Economic Times, 13 June 2026.
An op-ed on the normalization of profanity — its passage “through a series of Overton windows” from Lawrence and Salinger to the present, closing on Trump. Its Mailer interest is the framing anecdote: the publishers’ softening of the soldiers’ profanity to “fug” in The Naked and the Dead (1948), and the apocryphal Tallulah Bankhead exchange Suraiya relays as folklore (the line is as often pinned on Dorothy Parker). Mailer is the hook, not the subject; but the “fug” episode remains the single most durable piece of Naked and the Dead lore.