Monkey Fighter

[Luissa]

This story is hilarious!

Muffingate, or the making of a PBS-style euphemism | Need to Know

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The sausage
Muffingate, or the making of a PBS-style euphemism
By Win Rosenfeld
October 25, 2010

There’s no question that Peter Sagal is a perfect addition to the Need to Know family; he’s funny, insightful and game to take on the tricky role of show closer. If you haven’t caught it yet, check out his first “advice column.” But this three-minute essay came with a problem we hadn’t run into before at Need to Know: How do we say a dirty word without saying a dirty word?

Peter calls Rahm Emanuel a “monkey fighter,” a euphemism we concocted for another, more explicit dig that uses an “M-F” construction. We like it because it’s hard to mistake what he really means, and it just sounds funny. But initially, Peter’s copy was a little less … abstract. In its first iteration, the word in question was: “mother lover.” And although we loved Peter’s script, our PBS spidey sense went off. After much brow furrowing and head scratching, we decided that “mother lover” was just too close to the term it attempted to sub for. We don’t have any problem with people loving their mothers, but we felt that “mother lover” was evoking something a little too explicit for our air.

 

[JW Frogen]

I would fight a gazillion monkeys to make the world safe for democracy!

Fuck I am drunk.

 

[JW Frogen]

I would make love to quite a few of them too.

Fuck I am drunk.