Story by Stefan Verbano

Illustration by Gabriella Narvaez
Watch your language!—This scolding remark can be heard across the nation, from dinner tables to church pews to elementary school playgrounds, as if certain words can take on minds of their own if not properly policed. In an increasingly pluralistic society, profanity—synonyms for which include “cursing,” “swearing,” “expletives,” and “cussing”—has reared its dirty head in all aspects of life, from exclamations of pain, hatred, frustration, and stress to even love and passion. To combat this influx of begrimed speech and the unraveling of society’s moral fabric that it supposedly engenders, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been instilled with the responsibility of ensuring the decency of broadcast speech. However, the final determination of what can and cannot be verbalized comes with the pounding of a courtroom gavel.
At the center of profanity’s long and convoluted roundtrip from public airwaves to judges’ benches and back again lies stand-up comedian George Carlin. In a performance at Milwaukee’s Summerfest in July 21, 1972, Carlin was arrested and charged with violating obscenity laws after completing his “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” routine originally recorded on his third comedy album Class Clown.
“Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits: those are the Heavy Seven. Those are the ones that’ll infect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war,” Carlin snarls on the track.
In the resulting court case, the judge declared that though Carlin’s language was indecent, the comedian nonetheless had the freedom to say it as long as he did not cause a public disturbance. The case was eventually dropped, but resurfaced again the next year when the FCC received complaints about a similar Carlin routine called “Filthy Words” on the Pacifica station WBAI-FM.
The issue eventually came before the Supreme Court in the 1978 case FCC v. Pacifica Foundation in which the court ruled 5-4 in the Commission’s favor, finding Carlin’s routine to be “indecent but not obscene.”
As censorship proponents necessitate the defense of family values while libertarians counter with idealisms like “freedom” and “liberty,” the rest of society is left to make up its mind, and too often are the more-or-less benign origins of these terms overlooked. To fully comprehend the effects of language—both positive and negative—on those who advocate for or condemn its use, one must first consider an extrapolation of Shakespeare’s age-old quandary: “What’s in a name?”

FUCK

Midway through the 1983 classic A Christmas Story, loveable protagonist and narrator Ralphie drops the hubcap, spilling lug nuts as his father changes a flat tire on the family car, and letting loose one of film’s most famous utterances of the bombshell. Though the nine-year-old Indiana boy says “fudge” on camera, the narrator is quick to interject, “only I didn’t say ‘fudge.’ I said the word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the F-dash-dash-dash word!”
Placing its highly-offensive and arguably blasphemous meanings aside, “fuck” is a marvel of modern slang. It can be used as a verb, adverb, adjective, command, interjection, noun, and can essentially replace any word in any sentence (“that fucking fuck fucked the fucking fuckers”). In the English language, “fuck” is one of the few words that can be supplanted inside the stem of an existing word—called an infix—to enhance or alter its meaning. These “expletive infixes” can assume the form of terms like “fan-fucking-tastic” or “un-fucking-believable.”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the etymology of “fuck” is somewhat unclear, but is often traced back to Germanic languages through words like “ficken” (German: to fuck), “fokka” (Swedish: to strike or copulate), “fokken” (Dutch: to breed, strike or beget) and “fukka” (Norwegian: to copulate). In Latin, the word “futuere” can have a similar meaning to the English infinitive verb “to fuck.” Romance languages adapted the word including the French “foutre” and Italian “fottere.” Prior to Latin, the Greek word “phyo” is etymologically similar, which means “to beget” or “to give birth to.”
Several urban legends have arisen in the last half-century claiming the word has its roots in acronymic form. Though the word’s thousands of years of usage dispels many of these supposed origins, one legend claims that the acronym stood for the grant of royal permission to fornicate. During the Black Plague outbreak of the 1340s, townships supposedly imposed limitations on procreation in order to control interaction between infected populations. Couples wishing to bear children were required to obtain royal consent; thus, “Fornication Under Consent of the King,” which was later shortened to the acronym “FUCK.”

SHIT

Derived from the Old English nouns “scite” (meaning dung), “scitte” (meaning diarrhea), and the verb “scitan” (to defecate), like “fuck,” “shit” retains the popular belief that it was derived from acronymic origins. “Ship High In Transit,” a term often attributed to the false etymology, was once used to express the need to stow manure above water lines during ship transport to avoid leakage and contamination.
Despite taking a backseat to “fuck” in terms of offensiveness, “shit” is still censored on broadcast television networks, though its use is permitted under stringent FCC exceptions. Interestingly, the alternative four-letter word “crap,” synonymous in literal form with “shit,” is usually not subject to censorship and has become generally more accepted and appropriate in the English-speaking world.

CUNT

This highly-offensive vulgarism literally refers to female genitalia, but is also used in slang as a derogatory epithet describing “an unpleasant or stupid person.” A Merriam-Webster Dictionary entry specifically restricts the meaning of the word to the female gender, referring to a disparaging or obscene woman, and notes its use in the US as “an offensive way to refer to a woman.” However, in certain colloquial British, New Zealand, and Australian speech, the term can be used with a positive qualifier to convey a sense of praise or admiration. For example, the terms “good cunt” or “clever cunt” may not be considered as offensive in such countries.
According to the 1972 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest citation of the usage of  “cunt” refers to a London street circa 1230 known as “Gropecunt Lane.”
Irish avant-garde novelist and poet James Joyce was among the first 20th-century novelists to use the word “cunt” in print. In his Joyce’s novel Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, who is the book’s hero, describes the Dead Sea as “the grey sunken cunt of the world.” “Cunt” is most often thought to be derived from the Germanic word “kunto,” appearing as “kunta” in Old Norse. The word also has an unsubstantiated relationship to similar-sounding words such as the Latin “cuneus” (meaning wedge) and “cunnus” (meaning vulva), which is derived from the French “con,” the Spanish “coño,” and the Portuguese “cona.”

COCKSUCKER

Within the realm of vulgar slang, this noun literally refers to one who performs the act of fellatio, or oral sex on male genitalia.
“Cock” by itself is an onomatopoeia derived from the call of a rooster and can benignly refer to anything from valve types to clock parts to airplanes. As a colloquial profane vulgarism, “cock” literally means “penis,” roughly as offensive as the word “dick.” The term is akin to the Old Norse “kokkr” and the Old French “coq” and “cocorico,” both of which are sound-imitative. Many English names for birds incorporate the word, like blackcock, peacock, and woodcock.
Though “cock” retains both vulgar and inoffensive meaning, “cocksucker” cannot claim the same innocence. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the word was first used in the 1890s in reference to “one who performs fellatio,” especially a male homosexual. Only in the 1920s was its meaning expanded colloquially to mean a “contemptible person.” Synonyms for “cocksucker’s” non-literal meaning, referring to a mean or despicable person, include “bastard,” “prick,” “dickhead,” and “son of a bitch.”
Though not etymologically linked, the Latin insult “irrumator” is similar to “cocksucker,” meaning “someone who forces others to give him oral sex;” hence, “one who treats people with contempt.” The Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus uses the insult in the poem “Catullus 10” to criticize his boss Gaius Memmius for treating his subordinates poorly, writing: “I answered that … the people themselves…can find any means of coming back fatter than they went, especially as they had such a(n) ‘irrumator’ for a praetor [Roman official], …”

As is the case with many of the Heavy Seven, the stigmatization and vilification of certain historically-harmless terms is what eventually leads them to become taboo. However, in the words of George Orwell, the inverse may also be true because “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” In the end, regardless of whether the infamous words Carlin fired off on stage four decades ago were causes or effects of social stigma, broadcast media is still punctuated with bleeps; loose-lipped dinner guests still spoil the appetites of their fellow patrons; and rebellious schoolchildren still fear the taste of soap.