Robert Fulford, reviewing the then recently published diaries of Northrup Frye, wrote:

He told his diary what he didn’t always express in print or in public. He often disliked the moral tone of the Toronto people he knew. ‘Every once in a while I get shocked by the callousness and brutality of members of my class,’ he wrote; sometimes they revealed that they thought the poor sub-human. He wasn’t impressed when Osbert Sitwell, one of the eminent Sitwells of England, came to Canada to lecture: ‘f I didn’t know him to be brilliant I’d say he was a dope.’He decided that obscenity is an ornament to language except when it becomes routine; then it approaches idiocy. He cited a colleague’s story about a First World War soldier who saw a dead mule at the bottom of a shellhole and remarked, ‘Well, that fuckin’ fucker’s fucked.’ Setting that down, Frye added, ‘What sort of person is it, incidentally, whose feelings would be spared by printing the above as ‘that —-in’ —-er’s —-ed,’ or ‘that obscene obscenity’s obscenitied’?” He had no time for prudes.

(National Post, 30 Oct 2001)