Well, I have to say that I did receive one or two reasonable comblaints about the use of bawdy words in thread titles. Some people use computers at libraries or at work that are have filters that won't allow loading of pages with words like "fuck" on them. I think this is fairly rare, so I'm not prepared to worry about it unless I'm convinced otherwise.

I have a number of books by folklorists Vance Randolph and G. Legman and Ed Cray. You'll find some pretty ripe words amongst the titles of some of the songs in these books, and the cover art on one Ed Cray book is probably politically incorrectly sexist. Still, they're from the work of three of the most renowned American folklorists. Should we euphemize their work?

The worst of this euphemization is in the world of sea songs, where the collectors euphemized so heavily that it's well-nigh impossible to find chanteys in their original form.

I think John is following in the footsteps of Randolph and Legman and Cray. He is working hard to document a large collection of work that is truly folk music. I certainly don't want to get in his way.

What do others think?

-Joe Offer-