This week, the Federal Communications Commission merely
shrugged over complaints that U2 singer Bono had violated TV obscenity
standards by uttering these words on a music awards show: "This is really,
really (F-word)ing brilliant."
Apart from 200-some complaints from an organized lobby to clean up TV, only
17 average Joes and Janes complained to the FCC. It concluded the word was
OK because Bono used a variant that had nothing to do with sex.
On CNN, the darling young anchor Anderson Cooper explained the ruling this
way:
Bono didn't violate the law because what he said, quote, "does not
describe sexual or excretory organs," or for that matter the filthy,
disgusting things people do with them. In other words he meant (bleep)ing,
the merely crude adjective, not (bleep), the
reprehensible verb.
The FCC also says it's OK to use such words as an insult. In other
words, I can call you a (bleep)er, but not because you (bleep)ed my sister.
If it gets too confusing for you, well, (bleep) you.
Anderson Cooper, who is young, droll and cute, used the F-word nine times
on the world's most popular TV network. The bleeps were so brief you could
hear every F and K.
. . .
The venerable New York Times has broken its own rules and printed the
F-word only once, in a transcript of the Starr Report. Monica Lewinsky
complained that Bill Clinton
helped (F-word) up my life.
I learned that sweet bit of trivia from the world's foremost authority on
the F- word. His name is Jesse Sheidlower. He is a 35-year-old linguist. He
is the principal North American editor of the esteemed Oxford English
Dictionary.
And he is the author of "The F Word" (Random House, out of print).
There's no question, he told me from his office in Manhattan,
that in the last 10 to 15 years, it's been increasingly acceptable and
appearing in places it never
appeared in the past. Such as the New Yorker magazine. Such as HBO.
Such as Canadian and British newspapers, where columnists use it in their
very first paragraphs.
The FCC ruled correctly, he says, because the F-word is rarely used anymore
in sexual references, but most often as what he called a general
intensifier.
