They are among the most familiar words in the English language, short and vigorous terms that tend to emerge in traffic jams, hip-hop songs, schoolyards, pitchers mounds, White House tapes and episodes of The Sopranos.
But if a group of U.S. congressmen have their way, those words will soon be illegal. A bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives this month would outlaw the expression on TV and radio of seven well-known words, including the four-letter terms for defecation, urination, fornication and the female genitals, as well as compound words that imply one resembles an anus, performs fellatio or engages in maternal fornication.
Doug Ose, a Republican congressman from California, launched his crusade to wash the mouths of Americans after he watched two awards shows recently in which celebrities uttered Anglo-Saxon epithets on stage. "There are a lot of latchkey kids," the congressman told the San Francisco Chronicle this week. "I don't want to be sitting there when a guy blurts something out over the TV and have my daughters ask me what those words mean."
He was particularly distressed by the rock star Bono, who enthused on the Golden Globe awards in October that, "This is really, really fucking brilliant."
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which regulates language on public-owned radio and TV airwaves (cable-only stations, such as Sopranos broadcaster HBO, are exempt) ruled that the Fox network was not violating its regulations in broadcasting that sentence because Bono was using the offending word in its adjectival form, and therefore "did not describe sexual or excretory organs or activities."
As a result, Mr. Ose's bill amends the broad prohibition against offensive language in the current broadcast legislation to specifically ban not only those seven naughty words, but also "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)."
Those words are rarely heard on network television. This has created an odd discrepancy in which such vulgarities are nearly ubiquitous in day-to-day life but are banished from prime-time TV.
Sometimes the walls between these worlds break down, as they did last month when the starlet Nicole Richie somehow confounded the five-second bleeper delay on the Billboard music awards, allowing millions of prime-time viewers to hear her utter the beguiling sentence: "Have you ever tried to get cow shit out of a Prada purse? It's not so fucking simple."
Those words provoked a tempête de merde of protest from parents' groups, inspiring Mr. Ose to draft his bill. He has the support of a number of other Republican legislators and his bill is expected to be debated later this month.
"It really is about the children," said Laura Mahaney of the Parents' Television Council, one of the groups backing the bill. "If they can't say those things in schools any more, they shouldn't be hearing it on prime-time television."
Even though those words used to be known as "schoolyard language," Ms. Mahaney said that most schools now ban them, and that television networks should be setting higher standards. "There's a huge difference between a pig in a barnyard and a pig in a parlour."
Mr. Ose's bill owes an unwritten debt to comedian George Carlin, who launched the entire institution of banning words with his 1972 monologue, The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television.
At the time, those words weren't formally banned. Mr. Carlin's list is identical to Mr. Ose's, except the Carlin list ends bathetically with the word "tits," while that word is absent from the bill and has been replaced with "asshole," which was missing from the 1972 list.
Mr. Carlin's monologue was broadcast on Pacifica Radio, a public-radio network in California. The FCC tried to censor the station, and the court battle lasted years. In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a profanity-laced ruling, determined that the FCC was within its rights in banning Mr. Carlin's monologue, and any similar uses of language.
That ban never mentioned specific words, though, and U.S. law currently bans only "obscene" language. Mr. Ose's bill would be unique in naming the specific offensive terms -- an odd development, some observers noted, since it means that the bill itself is more obscene than anything that could be put on TV.
The bill can be read, in its full and colourful language, by visiting the website http://thomas.loc.gov and typing its full name, HR3687, into the search engine.
In an interview not long ago, Mr. Carlin rolled his eyes at the Byzantine legislation that his monologue provoked. "That, of course, leaves out the fact that there are two knobs on the radio and television: One turns it off, the other changes the station."
Scholars of the U.S. Constitutional say the bill, should it pass, could easily provoke a courtroom battle on the scale of the one that Mr. Carlin's monologue stirred up.
Craig Smith, a law professor at California State University who specializes in censorship law, said the bill would face tough challenges because many of the words it bans cannot be proven to be offensive. As Mr. Carlin once famously noted, one of the words on the bill's list (but not his own) simply combines a word for "donkey" and a word for "concavity."
"I think you have to demonstrate that there's a harm," Mr. Smith said. "That's a burden they can't meet."
