Revenge of the Comfit-Makers' Wives

Geoff Nunberg

Commentary broadcast on "Fresh Air," March 16, 2004

A lot of people were dismayed when the FCC refused to sanction NBC last year after Bono uttered the f-word on the Golden Globe awards broadcast, saying "This is really, really, fucking brilliant."1 But as the agency noted, their guidelines limit indecency to "material that describes or depicts sexual or excretory organs or activities." whereas Bono had merely used the word as "an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation," as the agency put it. (Actually some people have suggested that Bono's fucking is really an adverb modifying the adjective brilliant, but I could go either way on that one -- if it were really an adverb, shouldn't it have been fuckingly?)2

For a lot of critics, though, the ruling was a clear sign that the FCC had lost its moral moorings. In the wake of the flap over Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl, FCC Commissioner Michael Powell announced that he would be reconsidering the Bono ruling. And California Republican Rep. Doug Ose recently introduced the "Clean Airwaves Act" to close what he described as a loophole in the legal definition of indecency. The act explicitly lists seven words that will qualify a broadcast as indecent, however they're used, "including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms." 3

Ose's bill is easy picking for satirists, of course -- a law that would make it a punishable offense to read its own text over the airwaves. But you have to admit that the FCC was being a little obtuse when it held that Bono's remark wasn't profane. Who's kidding whom here? Does anybody really think that fucking is less of a profanity when it's an intensifier modifying brilliant than when it's describing sexual activity?

The fact is that profanity isn't a question of subject matter. It works by a kind of contagious magic, in the phrase that Sir James Fraser used in The Golden Bough -- the reference pollutes the word, and the word profanes everything else it comes in contact with, even when it has nothing to do with the original meaning. That's the principle that children exploit when they take a naughty pleasure in pronouncing shamPOO. And that's why our sense of propriety can be satisfied by the simple expedient of bleeping out part of the word or substituting an asterisk for its vowel. Swear words are like magic spells -- they lose their power if every syllable isn't enunciated just so.

In fact profanity is our first lesson in linguistic transgression, which we master even before we understand what it means to lie. That's why it's always a little weird to hear foreigners cursing in English, even if they speak the language fluently. You know that nobody ever washed their mouths out with soap for saying them.

So the prudes and the profaners are locked into an eternal co-dependence. Swearing has always flourished most luxuriantly in ages when it could count on a strain of middle-class delicacy to work against. In Henry IV Part I, Hotspur rebukes his wife for using the dainty shop-keeper's oath "in sooth" -- "You swear like a conmfit-maker's wife… Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art, a good mouth-filling oath."

And say what you will about Ose's bill -- at least he and his colleagues are doing their part to keep some of the magic of swearing alive. When you turn to one of the subscription channels and hear a profanity-laced monologue by Margaret Cho, Bill Maher, or Chris Rock, half the pleasure comes from imagining how apoplectic some people would get if they heard that language on NBC or CBS. It gives you the sense you're getting something for your fifty-nine bucks a month. And we all have a stake in keeping those inhibitions alive. Every time we tell our children not to use the f-word, we're making a little investment in the future health of profanity. If we ever reach the point where every local TV weatherman is using the word, it won't mean any more for us than "darn" does.

But while the family values crowd have already had their effects on programming, they're ultimately fighting a losing battle. The problem isn't that they're being obvious hypocrites. Of course they are, but then where would profanity be without hypocrisy? What does a swear-word come down to, in the end, if not something you can say in private but not in public?

But the boundaries have gotten pretty arbitrary nowadays. Time was that the disapproval of public profanity reflected a basic line of demarcation in American life between the parlor and the rooms in the back of the house. Now it's just a tick mark in the double digits on the dial -- not much of a frontier, particularly when 90 percent of Americans pay for some form of subscription TV. And it's hard to imagine what Henry James would have made of a world where you can use the f-word in The New Yorker but not The New York Times. Not that the Times is wrong to abjure profanity -- it's of a piece with the Edwardian habit of referring to everybody as mister, even Sting and Moby. But whom are we pretending to protect from what?

And when you listen to the run of broadcast fare these days, it's clear these linguistic scruples don't have much to do with stemming the tide of vulgarity and coarseness. Nowadays, questions of public morality usually come down to purely symbolic gestures. The lesson of the Super Bowl brouhaha was that images of crotch-biting dogs and farting horses are less of a threat to the moral health of the republic than a glimpse of nipple jewelry.

We've gotten to the point where someone can offer a Clean Airwaves Act that consists of a single paragraph containing a list of seven words. Actually, that's the one thing that makes me wonder if we've let things go too far. Just seven words? Falstaff wouldn't have known where to start.

Notes

1. In the broadcast version of this piece I used the form "effing" here. return

2. Just after this piece aired I had an email from an English teacher who remonstrated with me for saying that fucking might not be an adverb. " I don't think we can afford to suggest that only words that end in -ly are adverbs," she said. But while I agree that you wouldn't want to say that very wasn't an adverb in "very brilliant," the facts about fucking aren't that clear. Contrast:

1. How brilliant was it? Extraordinarily (so).
2. How brilliant was it? Very.
3. *How brilliant was it? Fucking (so).

In fact fucking might be better analyzed here as an emphatic particle on the model of an interjection like oh or say. For one thing, it seems odd to analyze fucking as an adverb when it's used as an infix in "in-fucking-credible."

For that matter, it seems odd to analyze fucking as an adjective in a phrase like "no fucking way" -- after all, it certainly doesn't tell us what kind of way this is, nor does it pass the ordinary tests for adjectives, as in "*The test seemed fucking," etc. return

3. The bill actually lists eight forms in all, by allowing for the writing of asshole as two words:

As used in this section, the term `profane', used with respect to language, includes the words `shit', `piss', `fuck', `cunt', `asshole', and the phrases `cock sucker', `mother fucker', and `ass hole', compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).'

The list is different from the list that George Carlin gave in the famous monologue that the Supreme Court held to be indecent in its 1974 decision in FCC v. Pacifica -- it omits tits and adds asshole. But as Carlin noted in the routine, tits should never have been there in the first place:

Tits doesn't even belong on the list, you know. It's such a friendly sounding word. It sounds like a nickname. 'Hey, Tits, come here. Tits, meet Toots, Toots, Tits, Tits, Toots.' It sounds like a snack doesn't it? Yes, I know, it is, right. But I don't mean the sexist snack, I mean, New Nabisco Tits. The new Cheese Tits, and Corn Tits and Pizza Tits, Sesame Tits Onion Tits, Tater Tits, Yeah. Betcha can't eat just one. That's true I usually switch off . But I mean that word does not belong on the list.

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