By Paul Yeager, author of Literally, the Best Language Book Ever

For those of you who believe that poorly behaving athletes is a modern problem, check out this yahoo.com blog: Late 19th century ball players sure used creative vulgarities.

The blog highlights a memo (I don’t know what it was called then!) from the league, highlighting some of the vulgarity used by baseball players around and, in some cases, directed at fans, issued in 1898. The blog shows the offending phrases blocked out, but the article includes a link if you want to see the uncensored correspondence.

I’ll put it this way: It’s a good thing that they didn’t have access to Twitter back then. Yikes.