The Gray Lady gets coy again

Dave Itzkoff, "Putting Away His Toys", NYT 4/17/2013:

The lesson he learned about Mr. Bay, he said, was that “behind the intensity and, oftentimes, the complications of getting” things (Mr. Johnson used a different word) “done in an efficient way is a very insightful guy.”

This seems, not for the first time, directly contradictory to that newspaper's policy on "coarse" vocabulary:

Discussion about an expletive does not end with the decision against using it. The Times also forgoes offensive or coy hints. An article should not seem to be saying, “Look, I want to use this word, but they won’t let me.”

Over the years, we've discussed the NYT's creative avoidance of "obscene words" a surprisingly large number of times:

"No fuckin' winking at the Times", 8/17/2005; "[Expletive discussed]", 7/1/2005; "Words that can't be printed in the NYT", 6/5/2006; "Taking shit from the president", 7/16/2006; "Further annals of taboo avoidance", 10/4/2006; "The NYT transgresses", 8/23/2007; "Music Review: ********", 11/13/2007; "Times bowdlerizes column on Times bowdlerization", 7/12/2008; "No getting laid in the NYT", 11/12/2008; "Getting laid in the NYT (part 2)", 11/22/2008; "Annals of Bowdlerization: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot", 12/6/2009; "The language of 'Mad Men' and the perils of self-expurgation", 7/22/2010; "Annals of [having sex] [feces]", 8/7/2010; "Larkin v. the Gray lady", 4/16/2012