A column on writing from Editor & Publisher April 11, 1981.

Taboo Language

A taboo word is defined here as one that cannot be printed on the pages of a North American daily without the approval of the top editor, and maybe the publisher.

The most recent Obscenity Headache fell upon these worthies last October, 1981, when the Abscam video tapes were released. The commercial TV networks I watched played a few minutes with bleeps replacing the four-letter words. PBS, the Pubic Broadcasting System, however, ran three hours with no deletions.

For me, the language was the least offensive element of the haggling between the congressmen and the FBI agents. For others, taboo words are too distracting. The exact words, in print particularly, don't seem to clarify story, they subvert it.

Why? H.L. Stevenson, editor-in-chief of UPI, said it best in 1969 when people were being arrested for writing "**** THE DRAFT" on their foreheads. The purple prose was often the story, but we had to tell it without the words. Stevenson remarked, "What people are willing to hear and say seems to be different from what they will accept in print."

This was borne out again by the transcribed tapes of President Nixon, disclosing his efforts to untangle himself from the Watergate mess. Citizens appeared as outraged at his locker room language in the Oval Office as at his nefarious strategies. Evidently, our readers want taboo language to remain taboo.

There are seven four-letter words that had never appeared all spelled out in most modern general dictionaries before 1960. The trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover made the words legal to print, but they did not appear in newspapers before the Nixon tapes, except for typos.

In 1978, the Supreme Court affirmed a reprimand by the Federal Communications Commission to Radio station WBAI on which a comic ^{Footnote 1} had done a routine about seven offensive words that the judges did not find funny. The Page 7 headline of the New York Times story read, "Justices Support F.C.C. in the '7 Dirty Words' Case." None of the words are mentioned in any form, so that the reader, perhaps someone working in radio, has no way of knowing from this story which words are banned on the air.

If they are the same seven I researched in the 1960's ^{Footnote 2} they are, to spell the first two as did Eric Partridge in a daring 1958 dictionary: f**k, c**t. The other five: arse (ass in U.S.A. and now the least offensive), c*ck, f*rt, p*ss, and sh*t.

All were once SE, Standard English. None is a profanity, an expression using sacred words blasphemously (Oh, hell!). Each is an obscenity, naming a part of the body or its function. Some, like pisser and merde in French, are not taboo in other languages. They appear almost daily in our comic pages as #$%!&!, with no outcry from parents.

Early in 1980, the Rhode Island Supreme Court ruled that "four-letter words have First Amendment protection and people can't be prosecuted for shouting them at police." Thus, the question of whether to print or broadcast the Dirty Seven will return.

There are many more than seven vulgar words, but how shall we decide which are still forbidden when so many once-banned ones are now allowed? Routinely printed are direct quotes like, A labor leader characterized the Reagan economic program as "Screw the Poor."

• If you as a writer decide that a foul word in direct, attributed speech (no other use has been entertained) is essential to your story, you must flag it as do the wire services. Your editors must be alerted to all impending migraines.

For more on taboo language in newpapers, see #8, Fulsome But Printable.

^{Footnote 1} The comic referred to above was George Carlin, whose 7 Dirty Words routine listed: sh*t, p*ss, f*ck, c*nt, c*cksucker, motherf*cker, tits. He had 5 right--tits doesn't belong, and motherf*cker repeats f*ck. Later he added f*rt and turd, but turd doesn't belong either. Google to hear him. One performance of the Seven Words routine, video loads and plays automatically.

^{Footnote 2} During the hippie era, I first reported on the media coverage of taboo language in Esquire, The Magazine for Men. See **** Is No Longer A Dirty Word, my Esquire article, April 1969, pg. 136, which will be on this web site soon. It also appears as Chapter 2 in The Open Conspiracy: When Nothing is Sacred, What is Profane?

There you will learn the history of those asterisks and that the number 7 comes from the research of anthropologist Ashley Montagu, "who scanned the 11,000,000 words of the English tongue and could find only seven durable ones so objectionable, so offensive, so heinous as to have been omitted ... for generations from most general dictionaries. Make inquiries about ordering The Open Cospiracy here."

The latest as of this writing: BLEEPING EXPLETIVES, William Safire's On Language column, Sunday 1/4/09, The N.Y. Times Magazine, pg. 12.

Ethel Grodzins Romm is a writer and editor currently living in New York City. She is the author of The Open Conspiracy: What America's Angry Generation is Saying (review) (auction with cover), several of the Strategies in Reading workbook series and others. She appeared in the film Paranormal: Science or Pseudoscience? She has written columns on language for Editor & Publisher, The American Bar Association Journal and many others. She is currently working on a book on management.