Comedian George Carlin always cheerily referred to himself as ''a footnote in American legal history,'' and in the wake of his death from a heart attack Sunday night, he turned into the most frequently cited footnote since that infamous one in the Starr Report about Bill, Monica and cigars.

And about as difficult to write about in a family-friendly forum. For all the changes in the world since 1978, when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the FCC in fining a radio for broadcasting Carlin's poetically pottymouthed Seven Dirty Words routine, several of those words still make editors blanch and readers fire off smoking letters. Rarely can a single one of the seven be printed in The Miami Herald undisguised by asterisks or dashes.

That illustrates the paradoxical, lurching course of American culture over the past 30 years. What Carlin called ''the seven words you can never say on television'' -- they all refer to sexual practices, body parts or things you do in the bathroom -- are spoken in daily profusion on cable TV.

HBO's revisionist Western Deadwood featured such a deluge of the F-word that several websites began counting them. (The show averaged 1.56 utterances per minute over its three seasons.) Comedy Central's scabrously funny cartoon South Park saved viewers the trouble of waddling over to their computers; its episode It Hits The Fan kept a running counter in the corner of the screen toting up its use of the S-word -- an Olympian 162 times in half an hour.

But even on the broadcast networks, the FCC's triumph over Carlin and the Los Angeles station that broadcast his routine initially seemed more a last stand than a sweeping victory. Within a couple of years of the Supreme Court's decision, a few of the seven words started popping up in prime time.

In 1990, researchers working on a study for the Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media monitored 70 random prime-time hours on the broadcast nets and recorded three usages of one of Carlin's words. Four years later, repeating the experiment, they found nine instances in 86 hours. In the early years of Saturday Night Live, cast member Laraine Newman was forced to personally apologize to network censors for blurting out the phrase ''pissed off'' during a late-night skit; by 1989, the censors were routinely OK'ing prime-time NYPD Blue scripts including stuff like one character referring to another as a ``pissy little bitch.''

And yes, piss -- excuse me, p--- -- was one of Carlin's seven words. So, believe it or not, was tits, another word regularly used in scripted network programming. But the stronger ones have also made it to air. The F-word peppered both the 2002 CBS documentary 9/11 and ABC's 2004 telecast of Saving Private Ryan. Even the word that's probably the Queen Mother of all obscenities, an unflattering reference to female nether regions, reached the air earlier this year when Jane Fonda used it on The Today Show. NBC apologized, to be sure, but the sky didn't fall.

If all this makes it sound as if Carlin lost the battle 30 years ago but won the war, don't be so sure. Even before Janet Jackson's infamous wardrobe malfunction during the 2004 Super Bowl, public complaints to the FCC about broadcast indecency were jumping exponentially -- from fewer than 14,000 in 2002 to nearly 170,000 in 2003. In the first half of 2006, the last statistics the FCC's beleaguered enforcement bureau has compiled, there were more than 327,000 complaints.

Join the discussion

Note: If this is your first time using our NEW commenting system, you will have to LOG OUT and then LOG BACK IN.

The Miami Herald is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what's in the news. Some of the comments may be reprinted elsewhere in the site or in the newspaper. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point. In order to post comments, you must be a registered user of MiamiHerald.com. Your username will show along with the comments you post. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.

     Showing: Oldest first Newest first Most-recommended first Least-recommended first

@Nyx.AuthorDisplayName@ wrote on @Nyx.PostedAtTime@:

@Nyx.CommentBody@

@Nyx.Recommender@ @Nyx.AbuseReporter@