• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, September 1, 2017

It is time for the TV Blog to close the book on the subject of the f-word.

As readers of this column are well aware, I sometimes weigh in on the subject of profanity and its encroachment onto advertiser-supported television.

And as with most content-related subjects a critic harps on, the harping is all for naught. The debate over violence on TV, for example, ended long ago -- and violence won.

Words that the majority of us long considered inappropriate for general media are now in wide use on TV and elsewhere.

The TV Blog decided to throw in the towel on the f-word the other day when this week’s New Yorker magazine arrived and it contained an ad for a play in which a variation of the f-word features prominently and in large type.

The word has long been approved for New Yorker stories, most commonly in the context of quotes from interview subjects who apparently cannot help themselves.

In the same issue this week, though, one of the New Yorker writers included a description of people smelling each other's rectums that I couldn't believe I was reading in the New Yorker. (He used a cruder word than rectums.)

When I came upon this phrase in a story about reality television, shortly after seeing the f-word ad a few pages previously, I actually said out loud to no one in particular (since there was no one else in the room): “OK, I'm out. If this wording is OK with the editors of the New Yorker, then I am officially out of synch with civilization.”

And so, I leave the consideration of this subject with a story about George Carlin and a brief correspondence I had with him about language in 2001.

One day in March of that year, I received an email from him in response to a column I had written that was published that day in The New York Post, where I was the TV columnist. The column was about the increasing use of words in prime-time TV shows that had previously been considered out of bounds.

A handful of the words were ones Carlin had first identified in his famous bit from the 1970s, “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television,” on his “Class Clown” album (1972).

I made a passing reference to the “Seven Words” bit in a paragraph about a 1978 Supreme Court decision in which the court ruled that the words Carlin identified could be lawfully regulated by the FCC. They had aired on a progressive, public radio station and someone complained to the FCC.

Referring to one of the words then beginning to be used on TV, I wrote that the word “is one of the seven dirty words the Supreme Court ruled could be banned from the airwaves by the Federal Communications Commission. That decision, from 1978, was a response to a radio station playing the George Carlin routine known as ‘The Seven Dirty Words You Can't Say on Television’.”

I had apparently gotten a number of the details wrong and Carlin was moved to write to me to set the record straight. It was a great email to receive, not least because he was so nice and polite about it. Plus, it really illustrated why Carlin was one of the era's great experts on language. This was a guy who really thought about it.

“Hiya, Adam,” he wrote in an email from California. “Saw your recent story, and just wanted to clarify a couple of points. No big thing, just my dopey need for order.

“The actual routine played on WBAI in 1973 was not ‘The Seven Dirty Words You Can't Say on Television.’ It was a bit called ‘Filthy Words,’ the follow-up [on his next album, “Occupation: Foole”] to the original piece, which went by the name of ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television’.

“I purposely never used ‘the’ in the title,” he wrote, “because I didn't want to limit the list, knowing I might want to amend it later. And, of course, I have NEVER thought of them as dirty words; that's society's hang-up, not mine. That coinage first appeared in a Los Angeles Times headline (first edition only) in 1978: ‘COURT BANS SEVEN DIRTY WORDS’.

“Regarding the rest of the list,” he continued, and then listed the seven words, which I will refrain from doing here, “the only one you hear at all is ‘piss,’ and then, only when it refers to drunkenness or anger: ‘He was completely pissed,’ or ‘He was completely pissed off.’ Never when referring to urination.”

And here's the part I love best: “In other words, it's perfectly acceptable for one man to say to another, ‘Why are you pissed off at me?’ But it's completely UNacceptable for the second man to say, ‘Because you pissed on me.’ Just changing the preposition, apparently, makes it ‘dirty’.”

He went on to clarify aspects of the Supreme Court's decision. He also mentioned that his father had briefly worked as national sales manager of The Post when Carlin was a boy. He grew up in the Bronx.

“Thanks for listening,” he wrote at the end of his email. “I hope you don't mind my minor corrections. Best to all -- stay cool. George Carlin.