Number of words: 557

Shakespear wrote, “But words are words. I never yet did hear/That the bbruised heart was pierced through the ear.” Yet most people don’t see it that way. The FCC and network censors are not inveterate prudes; they are responding to a huge constituency of listeners who light up a station switchboard like a Christmas tree when an actor or guest lets slip an obscenity. To these guardians of decency, profanity is self – evidently corrupting, especially to the young. This argument is made in spiteof the fact that everyone is familiar with the words, including most children, and that no one has ever spelled out how the mere hearing of a word could corrupt one’s morals.

To the libertines, what’s self evident is that linguistic taboos are absurd. A true moralist, they say, should hold that it’s violence and inequality that are “obscene,” not sex and excretion. And the suppression of plain speaking about sex only leads to teen preganency, sexually transmitted disease, and the displacement of healthy sexual energy into destructive behaviour. This air of  progressiveness helped to make Bruce a martyr among artist and intellectuals: “A moral conscience second to none,” wrote the critic Ralph J. Gleason; “Saint Lenny, I should call him; he died for our sins,” wrote the performance artist Eric Bogosian.

Yet since the 1970s some of the pregressive constituencies that most admired Bruce have imposed linguistic taboos of their own. During the O.J. Simpson trial, the prosecutor Christopher Darden referred to the n-word as “the dirtiest, filthiest, nastiest word in the English language, and it has no place in a courtroom, most famously in the Simpson trial to prove that a police officer was a racist, and in other trials to determine wheather a person can be fired for using it, or excused for assaulting someone else who uses it. And in “the new Victorianism,” casual allusions to sex, even without identifiable sexism, may be treated as forms of sexual hasassment, as in Clearence Thomas’s remarks about porn stars and public hair. So even people who revile the usual bluenosescan become gravely offended when they hear words on their own lists of taboos.

Another puzzle about swearing is the range that are the targets of taboo. The seven words you can never say on television  refer to sexualityand excretion: they are names for faces, urine, intercourse, the vagina, breasts, a person who engages in fellatio, and a person who acts out an Oedipal desire. But the capital crime in the Ten Commandments comes from a different subject, theology, and the taboo words in many languages refer to perdition, deities, messiahs, and their associated relics and body parts. Another symantic field that spawns taboo words across the worlds languages is death and disease, and still another is disfavoured classes of people such as infields, enemies, subordinate ethenic groups. But what could these concepts – from mammaries to messiahs to maladies to minorities – have in common?

A final puzzle about swearing is the crazy range of circumstances in which we do it. There is cathartic swearing, as when we hit our thumb with a hammer or knock over a glass of beer. There are imprecations, as when we suggest a label or offer advice to someone who has cut us off in traffic.

Excerpt from’The seven words you can’t say on television by Steven Pinker.’