Seven Dirty Words -- In Retrospect Not So Restrictive

George Carlin (Reuters photo)

This week marks the 50th anniversary of George Carlin's “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," which your humble blogger won't delineate here but can be quickly found with an Internet search.

Knowing the culture of 1972, one can easily guess at a dozen that could be on the list---George Carlin's seven will be a subset--and all refer to sex or excretory functions whose utterance horrified polite society. You still shouldn't say any of them in church, but they are increasingly used in musical lyrics and entertainment.

The bluenose old ladies who once dictated the rules of language have been supplanted by the latter-day Red Guards pouring out of our colleges to police what can't be said (e.g., "all lives matter") and what one must say (e.g., "black lives matter") to avoid shunning.

Maybe Carlin’s gift to the world wasn’t identifying the hypocrisy of having words you can’t say on TV but pointing out that shutting down words or ideas or thoughts is destructive to a free society. He’d probably be aghast at the state of social-media censorship today. If the price of our freedom is that someone may take offense, Carlin surely would think that’s worth the cost. I’d agree.

Thanks to censorship and technology, the public airwaves have been greatly diminished. Car radio moved to SiriusXM and Spotify. Television moved to cable and satellite and Blu-ray. Now it is all streaming and anything goes. I still think youth need to be protected, but good luck with that. Eight-year-olds with smartphones can hear the forbidden words daily. I laugh at Netflix’s kid-magnet warnings: “Gore, Language, Smoking.” Even Disney isn’t as family-friendly as it used to be.

Carlin died in 2008, as cancel culture and campus safe spaces for the anxious were beginning to become widespread. Today, there is a long list of things you can’t say, including “all lives matter” and “chief” and “birth mother” and even “master bedroom.” Goodbye discussion and thought. Then add sports-team names and wrong pronouns on playgrounds and shoot, we miss you, George Carlin.

After seeing how the new Puritanism works, a world where George Carlin can't say seven dirty words doesn't seem as restrictive.