Judge — February 4, 1922 — page 32: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Risque, Frisky, Asterisky By Orson Lowell W EVE The very latest and best, authoritative GUIDE BOOKS to Cuba and the West Indies been thinking about things again, This time it was about typographical chestnut-burrs, which the printer puts in from time to time for the sake of variety. What really cranked up the train of thought was a copy of The writ- ten in 1728, by xot with some wuar's Opera, Mr. which we ther light literature, for a teen-girl friend who was start- ing on a long raitroad journey. Later she handed it back te us with a de- mure little move, saying we'd better eschew it; she felt we were too old ¢ Gay, | read it. [t was all right 1 her, it seems, but not ra mid- v ictorian like us. So we nis Mr. | Gay proves to hav 1a reasonably frank and out-spoken writer, seldom topping at mere suggestion, or re- orting to intermissions, or to rows of asterisks when the dialogue or the action became war And then we realized how the poor asterisk had heen abused and brow-beaten into deing a lot of disreputable chores for which he was not originally intended ital. In Mr, Gay's day they didn't misuse the asterisk that way. But later—who started this »sition, anyhow? It's a bit of mid-Victorian uflage, no doubt, resorted to by old squeam of a censor, And it iras an imposition, for the aster- isk was designed first off, we take it, to refer the reader to a note at the hottom of the page, where the author could | go on and say some more on the same subject but in a lower tone—small, | whispering type—with- out the other characters hearing. And the reader could take it or leave it. Then that old censor I'm sure we've yot the goods on him—can't you | imagine exactly how he looked? So can I) fell to putting in a bunch of asterisks, assigning them to even lower tasks, when he wanted to de- lete; and then the } authors began doing it. Whenever they came to a part they thought | wouldn’t get by, or some- thing they didn’t want to honk right out and say, they'd drive clear up to the dangerous sexual some volume devote A companion the West, Indies cover in ¢ postpaid o crossing and then—the WILLIAM GREEN, INC. bars came down in the 627 W. 43rd ST., NEW YORK CITY form of a row of as terisks. Any word he saying, 20 A Private View—The fond parent who is forever “My boy, some day you may be President.” SEXUAL KNOWLEDGE fy WINFIELD SeOTT MALL. M.D. PaO SEX FACTS MADE PLAIN What every young man an & eemas she: | Ss eee: | isdietoual | use he—rany for an as- terisk, Yes, but it’s different with the dash. He may have been on the level, he has always con- sorted with brawlers «[ did not say broilers; IT said brawlers) and stood a lot of obscenity and profanity didn't dure for that was unspeakable We call it pretty rough stu Grabbing a young, uprisht asterisk ally inexperienced and never i tended for coarse work—maybe just out of high-school and the only sup- port of a widowed mother, and mak- (Continued on page 32