Secrets Of The 'Hustler' Style Guide

“Well, of course every publication has its own internal style guide, and ours was more than hilarious. We had lists of euphemisms, paragraphs of them, for every body part you could think of. Phrases like cover girl, which in Webster’s are two words, were one word at Hustler. Blow job was blowjob. (See here for more examples.) And the style guide had been in progress since the 70s, so many things had changed over time. For instance, there was an entry under ‘Goddamnit’ that said the expression was never to be used in a Flynt publication without editorial approval — which I thought was kind of strange, considering everything else that was okay. I was told that the rule was left over from Flynt’s brief born-again Christian phase in the 80s.”
 — The Last Word On Nothing’s Michelle Nijhuis interviews former Hustler copy editor Eric Althoff, who seems like a person who might be able to once-and-for-all settle the great fingering debate.