I’ve written two posts thus far referencing John Lennon, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned George Carlin yet. It’s a bit of a toss-up, but I suspect the latter might have been more influential in my life.
There were a couple of George’s sketches that I used to be able to perform nearly verbatim; most people couldn’t tell the difference. One was “the greatest bullshit story ever told” (i.e., religion) and the other was “the seven words you can’t say on television.”
Part of what made Carlin—and many other great comedians—so brilliant was their ability to tap into a slice of human reality and show us that what we, or society as a whole, believe about that slice is pretty fucking stupid. The magic is that rather than making you feel stupid, Carlin makes you laugh as if you’d never made the mistake yourself. You’re laughing at other people who make that mistake, and suddenly you’re on the other side of the fence. You walk into the auditorium with your belief in “X” so deeply ingrained that you aren’t even consciously thinking about it, and you leave as someone pointing and laughing at those who believe “X”—simply by virtue of laughing at George’s joke and not getting up to leave in protest.
With that in mind, let’s talk about “the seven words.”
Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. (No, I didn’t have to look them up.)
When I was a kid, it was okay to say “doo-doo” or “shoo-shoo” when you meant “shit,” but you weren’t allowed to say “shit” when you meant “shit.” You might think this is a trivial matter, but I beg to differ. Our society has labeled certain words as “bad” and replaced them with euphemisms that mean exactly the same thing but are socially acceptable. “Butt” was okay, but “ass” would get my ass beaten. Or, as George said, it is okay for Curt Gowdy to say “Roberto Clemente has two balls on him,” but he can’t say, “I think he hurt his balls on that play, Tony. Don’t you? He’s holding them. He must’ve hurt them.”
Is this really what we concern ourselves with?
When ice caps are melting, kids are starving, and half of our government thinks that people dressing as a gender that doesn’t match their biology is a global crisis, does it really matter if I say “shit” when I mean “I took a shit,” as opposed to the more acceptable “I took a dump”? “I went pooh-pooh?” “I went to powder my nose?”
Those are not “bad” words. They’re inconsequential. Shit, poop, doo-doo, feces, yada, yada, yada. They’re just fucking words.
Now, let’s imagine that I am a member of a whites-only social club and I say to a Black man, “You don’t belong here.”
Wow. Those are some bad fucking words, don’t you think?
Or imagine I’m the hiring manager for a construction firm and I say to a woman, “We don’t hire women.” Well, hell, is “hire” the bad word here? Or “don’t?”
Shit! You know what? I think the “bad” words aren’t about the words at all—they’re about the intent.
Words that exclude, deny, ridicule, demean, or marginalize other people… those are the bad words.
I might be laughing when I call one of my good friends a dip-shit, and he’d laugh right back at me. But what if I say the “N” word to a Black man, or a homophobic slur to a gay person? What if I called you “stupid” because of your religious beliefs? What if your I.Q. wasn’t as high as mine and I used a slur to describe your intelligence? These words became “bad” because of how they were used: as non-physical ways to assault another human being.
George was right; there are no intrinsically bad words. This might be an easy sacred cow for you to slaughter—a gateway to making delicious smoked ribs out of your previously held beliefs. There are bad intentions, bad motives, and bad people who happen to use words, but there are no words that are evil in a vacuum.
Our ability to use language is tremendously powerful, and you know what they (i.e., Stan Lee and Spider-Man) say about having “great power”… it comes with great responsibility.
Words are bad when they’re used to do wrong things. That’s not on the words themselves… it’s on the person saying them.
