This tells us where we're headed as a nation. Sad.
The US Federal Communications Commission just declared that shit and all its variants, including bullshit, are not merely indecent - which is where the law stood after the supreme court washed its seven dirty words out of comic George Carlin's mouth in 1978 - but are now profane if broadcast. That is a profound distinction. Legally, a profane word is "certain of those personally reviling epithets naturally tending to provoke violent resentment or denoting language so grossly offensive to members of the public who actually hear it as to amount to a nuisance". Nuisance, in this case, is not a dog barking but a word the community cannot tolerate. The FCC reserves "that distinction for the most offensive words in the English language".
This devil's dictionary has but two entries. Fuck, condemned in 2004 after Bono's joyful utterance of the adjectival form at the Golden Globes, and now shit. Notice what is not included: no racial or religious epithet, no hate speech. Thus, the S-word and F-word are worse than the N-word and K-word. Even the FCC recognises the uncomfortable and un-PC irony that these epithets may constitute constitutionally protected political speech, while bullshit does not.
But bullshit is political speech. It is our single most precious means of expressing displeasure with the political and the powerful. Without the word, we are left with far less satisfactory means of protest. Don't feed me the mothers' bromide about swear words indicating a limited vocabulary: bullshit is the most expressive word we have to convey disapproval. In his delightful treatise, On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt compares its equivalent: "It is more polite, as well as less intense, to say 'Humbug!' than to say 'Bullshit!'"
The big chill of the censor
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