It is long past time for the Federal Communications Commission to stop fainting on the couch over dirty words.
Let us drop the fake shock. The F bomb is no longer a linguistic outlier. It is everyday speech. Grocery stores. Job sites. Court hallways. Family dinners when the turkey burns. The language police lost this war decades ago, and the surrender papers were signed in permanent marker.
Is it polite? No. That is the point. Profanity exists to add force, volume, and emphasis where ordinary words fail. It is verbal punctuation. An exclamation mark with teeth. These words may have sexual origins, but in modern usage they have about as much to do with sex as a screwdriver has to do with architecture.
Most of the time they are insults. Sometimes they are comedy. Often they are pure frustration escaping the mouth at high velocity. What they are not is a threat to civilization.
This is, inconveniently for the censors, a free speech issue.
The late comedian George Carlin understood this perfectly, which is why he skewered censorship with surgical precision in his famous routine about the seven words the FCC feared most. Not because they caused harm, but because they caused panic:
- Shit
- Piss
- Fuck
- Cunt
- Cocksucker
- Motherfucker
- Tits
Our culture is changing. Rapidly. Not always wisely. But pretending that adults need linguistic training wheels is not preserving decency. It is just official cowardice with a rulebook.

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