What You Can't Say on the Radio

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Back in 1972, the comedian George Carlin released the stand-up album, one track was titled Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television. By the way, you can't say them on the radio either, we'll get a fine from the FCC, or worse, lose our license, but for the uninitiated, here's a little of how that routine went.

George Carlin: There are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of them you can't say on television. What a ratio that is, 399,993:7.

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They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous to be separated from a group that large. All of you over here, you seven, bad words.

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Brian Lehrer: Carlin's routine, which will be 50 years old next year is still pretty well known even by many in the younger generations because it still resonates today. It's funny because seven words, seemingly random, hold that much power, but maybe because of inflation since 1972, a new book cites nine. Joining me now is John McWhorter, Columbia University linguistics professor, host of the Lexicon Valley podcast at Slate, and author now of Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever. John, always good to have you on, welcome back to WNYC.

John McWhorter: Thanks for having me, Brian. I should say that it's actually 12 words, nine nasty because the alliteration is cute, but really it's 12 words, so you get three extra.

Brian Lehrer: Why 9 or 12? I'm not sure I understood what you just said, but why that many and not George Carlin's seven.

John McWhorter: For one thing, these days, we now process slurs in the way that a naive anthropologist would think of as profanity. Carlin didn't mention words that he would have thought of at slur, such as the N-word, but our take on the N-word now is the same as an ordinary person's take on the F-word a hundred years ago or even 50 years ago. Then there was also some pruning, a couple of the words that he used I figured were not really useful for today, but the result is nine main words, but really in total 12 that are our words that we single out and put in a different room.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get into some of the words in your book that we cannot say on the radio, let's get into two words out of your 9 or 12 that we can, and those are damn and hell, and they were not on George Carlin's list, but you're right that they are English's first bad words. How come?

John McWhorter: They're the first ones and they're not really profane today, and I thought about leaving them out of the book, but the truth is that if you're asked, "What are the bad words?" spontaneously, just like if somebody says name some fruits, you might say apples and pears. Although usually apples and pears are not most people's favorite fruits, but you have to say them first. Damn and hell are like that too, they're on the list, and it's because profanity evolves.

For anglophones, the first profanity was blasphemy against God and Jesus and related concepts, then things moved onto the body, and I think now things have moved on to slurs. To have a narrative arc in the book and to describe what profanity is, we have to start with something like what profanity was in the beginning.

Brian Lehrer: What was it? Let's talk about some of the history. You write, "Curses are words that have long ago ceased being themselves having been vested with the power of transgression. They may have emerged as ordinary words, but over time, they have made their way from our left brains to our right." What's an example of that? I know you'll be discrete.

John McWhorter: I will. For example, if you say what the F? What exactly is that F-word? In terms of grammar, what part of speech would you consider it to be? If we know what F is as a basic concept, what does it have to do with the what the F-ing that you're uttering there? It makes no sense whatsoever and that's because there's a difference between the word, and that's something generated in the left brain in most people, that's just ordinary vanilla language, and then an eruption which comes out of the right brain and is a gesture in the form of a word. There are all sorts of things you can do with language.

When you say, "What the F?" you're not using the word F in that sense, it's a transgressive gesture that happens to have the garb of what started out as a word that referred to something specific. We have these words that we think of as odd because they're words that we're not allowed to use in that Carlinesque sense. We figure why have the word if, for some reason, you can't use it and you're going to put it down in the basement? The thing is, in a way, these things aren't words, they're gestures. It's the way that we transgressed when we're using language as opposed to our fists or what clothes we put on or something like that. It's an interesting collection of words because it's words that have really become something else.

Brian Lehrer: You write that "Yelling out a bad word is related to the instinct that we have when we're running from danger," right?

John McWhorter: Yes. You know how when you're a kid and sometimes even when you're 55, you stub your toe on a door, and then you kick the door back like you want to get back at that door because that's the way that you blow off the steam? That's what cursing can be too. Something hurts you, something bothers you, and the way that you respond to it is to try to bother the world around you by breaking a rule. It's a normal human response, and any language has ways to do that. The question is just which words or what kind of grammatical construction, how the language is going to allow you to do that.

Brian Lehrer: From the school of deep linguistic geekiness, I see in your setup to your discussion of the F-word that English's vocabulary consists of two main layers that the starchier words tend to come from French and Latin, while the earthier ones are original English rootstock. What is that?

John McWhorter: That's just that generally with these words, there are exceptions, but for the most part, you can assume that they're going to come from the lower layers of the language, the earthy words that are the original stock. French lent us, for example, pork as opposed to pig, which is from English. French is beef, cow is English, so French hovers over. A lot of the words that we use now are French. Sometimes most of the words that we use in a sentence are from French, but it tends to be a word like art and pleasure and soldier. These are artifices, these are things that are above as opposed to words like aunt and brother and mother. Then most of our profane words are those original barnyard sorts of words.

Brian Lehrer: Historically, you're right that after the 1500s, that word that rhymes with duck is rarely printed except in code or religion illation, and eventually, appears in no dictionary from 1795 to 1965, that is from the dawn of the American nation to Bob Dylan playing electric guitar is how you cite those bookends. Did you really check that many dictionaries for the word and what happened in 1966?

John McWhorter: I didn't check all of them, but it's been so often said that I trust my forebears. The truth is that as America became a less formal society, our attitude towards those curse words that refer to the body started to change, and formal mores and FCC rules had a way of lagging behind the mundane reality. Yes, that F-word is interesting in that at first, there's a time when it's not profane, it's just salty, and there are people who actually have it in their ordinary names. I wish I could say on the air, but, well, you'd have to read the book to find out, but people were walking around with that in their names.

They were groves where people would go to, shall we say, get acquainted, and they were actually formally named with that, that was considered ordinary. Then the word becomes profane and it starts getting evermore euphemized, and after a while, it just disappears. We can be pretty sure that it was in old English, it's not attested in the corpus of Old English, but I am almost certain that if you yelled out that word in old England, people would know what you were saying, especially if you pronounced it right, but even in that corpus, it's never written because everything is just so formal in most of written Old English.

Yet, here we are today, and it's a word that I can certainly say, I probably use a couple of dozen times a day and I'm a pretty starchy, buttoned-up kind of person. Things have changed, there are other words that I would never use. My parents didn't use that word that much. I would never say, for example, a word beginning with C that is disparagingly used to refer to women, so I have my profanity too, it just changes over time, but that F-word has had an interesting history.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners who wants to talk about words without saying certain words that you can't say on the radio with the starchy and buttoned-up self-described college professor, Columbia University linguist, John McWhorter, his new book, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280 as we continue after this.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Columbia University linguistics professor, John McWhorter, host of the Lexicon Valley podcast at Slate and author now of nine Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever. Kit in Bayville an English teacher, you're on WNYC. Hi, Kit.

Kit: Hi, how are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. What you got for us?

Kit: I just wanted to stop by and say I find, first of all, the study of linguistic fascinating, but in reference to the F-word, I find it particularly fascinating that you can literally use it as every part of speech. You can use it as a noun, you can use it as a verb, you can use it as a Jaron. It's a very diverse word.

John McWhorter: It is. It's rather gorgeous in that way. Languages often have one word that just flowers in that fashion and to really learn to speak English is to learn the endless uses of that particular word. People often say, well, it's like punctuation, but no, what it is is many different branches of grammar that it can serve in the function of. I actually discuss that in the book. The word that begins with S that refers to excrement is rather similar, but the F-word takes the prize.

In Russian, the word for a male member that in English begins with D has that kind of fertility too. You never know which word it's going to be, but yes, it's one thing to say that that word is spreading all over the language and we're just more profane that we live in different times. To look at that, it's like with the use of light, it's associated with teenagers, but that now, I'm hearing people pushing 60 using in that way because it's getting old. There is grammatical complexity in words like that where somebody like me looks at it as this wonderful flowering bush of meanings, and yes, it's part of what makes language change fun.

Brian Lehrer: Onika in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Onika.

Onika: Hi. I just had a question. I was wondering why certain groups I'll find the C-word to be offensive when I'm from the West Indies and it's not that offensive at all.

John McWhorter: You mean the word that refers to something female?

Onika: Yes.

John McWhorter: These things vary by chance to an extent. I am leery of saying that it has something to do with differing attitudes towards women in cultures because that word also is taken much more lightly just in England than Australia than it is in the United States. For an American to be in London and to listen to how casually that word can be used to mean roughly buddy, as opposed to here in America where it is, along with the N-word, possibly the worst word in the language. Some of these things just very because of chance, you never know how these things are going to go.

Russian has all of those meanings for the male version of that word, we don't happen to do that to our version of that word. You never know how these things are going to go, but that word and a similar one that begins with P, you can play with those words more publicly in Britain and Australia I know, and I guess the West Indies too than in the United States. Or, for example, West Indies, that there's a sign for chicken soup and it was cork soup because cork means chicken. I saw the sign and for a minute I thought to myself, "Is that?" and then I said, "No, that must be the word for chicken," and that was perfectly ordinary whereas that has become impossible in other anglophone societies to use it that way.

Brian Lehrer: Related to this, one thing we were talking about in the office yesterday getting ready for this segment is how gendered a lot of this is. Like about Carlin seven words, two of them deal with female anatomy directly, and another is a compound word starting with the word mother, and all three are mostly used to insult men, so is there something about the female body that whoever makes words find more offensive than the male body? Is it a reflection of something sexist?

John McWhorter: There's something going on there definitely, not to mention, to call a man a woman in some way. For example, the F word with six letters, that is something that goes through a phase where it refers to women, and believe it or not, even children, and then migrates to referring to gay men, so there's this idea that to be feminine is to be wrong in some way. Yes, that's definitely an issue. Another interesting thing, though, is that I said can I put it this way? Yes. The word that begins with B implies that somebody is being offensive and knowing that they shouldn't be, and so, "Why you being such a B?" means you know you shouldn't do that, you're doing it on purpose.

That comes in sooner than the male equivalent to that, which is a word that it's a compound word that ends with hole and starts with an A. That is somebody who turns in front of your car in traffic, that's what that word means. It means somebody who is transgressing and knows that they could do better. That comes in after the female version of it. It's as if females get criticized for that before men do. It's one of those things that you see in the evolution of these words.

Brian Lehrer: Where does your discourse in the book on the N-word fit into this? Because you said at the beginning of the segment that what we consider curse words have moved in the direction of slurs.

John McWhorter: If you've got the editor Maxwell Perkins, who is so loathed to use the F word that he has to write it on his desk calendar and then push it over for the person in his office to see, that's a hundred years ago. He was an ordinary person, drank a lot, but to him, that was just such a taboo word. Nowadays, when we see some of the things that are happening with the N-word where people are criticized and sometimes disconnected from their jobs because of saying something that sounds like it or referring to the word rather than wielding it or writing it with asterisks or saying something in Mandarin that sounds like it. We've really gotten very, very picky about the N-word.

It has the same taboo status as those four-letter words had back in the day. An anthropologist would recognize that the profanity light is just shining in a different place today.

Brian Lehrer: Although people would say that that word triggers traumatic responses when the S-word or the F-word or some of those others do not.

John McWhorter: Yes, and you would also say that it can be seen as an advance. As you might imagine, I think that some of these things take things a little too far, but the general idea is that instead of being hung up on natural processes of the body, we're going to be hung up on dismissing subgroups of people and people who aren't in power. You could argue that that is an intellectual and moral advance in our sensibilities that we're paying so much attention to that.

Brian Lehrer: SJ in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hello, SJ.

SJ: Hi. I have a question about subcultures here in America and certain words that may not be FCC bad words, but just not words you're allowed to say. We weren't allowed to say the word lying growing up or liar. That was like a really big thing. We had to say like telling a story or fibbing. I knew other African-American friends of mine who also weren't allowed to say lie and I'm not sure. I was curious if you had any thought about that.

John McWhorter: That is really out there to me. One thing there's a lesson there in that profanity, it can be about various things. People often ask me, what is profanity going to be about next? After it passes away from the slur, what's the next thing? Mendacity, who knows? The only thing I can think of there if we're talking about African-American words is that the word lie, this is out there, there's a quirk in the word lie in Black English because you can say not you're a liar, but you can say you're a lie. That's something that you hear, especially among Southern Black people.

I don't know if it's going out, but I heard it when I was a kid, my mother definitely said it, I have read other people saying it. I'm not sure anybody knows exactly where that comes from, you're a lie to mean you're a liar, but there's something different and there's something particularly potent about when somebody says, "You're a lie." That's the only thing I can think of that would have something to do with liar being considered sacred in that way. There's a story yet to be told about that you're a lie. Some people think it has something to do with West Indian Creole. I am skeptical, but now I'm dragging you guys too far into the weeds. That's my guess on that.

Brian Lehrer: SJ, thank you very, very much. Even in the media, just to reflect on that, we're at a point now where we can call a politician a liar or say that the politician is lying more easily than we could even 15 years ago. Do you remember how big a controversy that was in the Bush administration around the Iraq war?

John McWhorter: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Saying some statements were false or other euphemisms for lie when they were really being accused of lying, then it became more out there as more acceptable in the Trump era. I think what it reflects, and we have 30 seconds for last thought of any kind from you, is that there is something about the word lie or lying as the caller brings up that's really toxic even if you're referring to a lie in another way.

John McWhorter: This might be a future chapter of Nine Nasty Words when I revise it in 20 years. This is definitely food for thought.

Brian Lehrer: John McWhorter, Columbia University linguistics professor, host of the Lexicon Valley podcast at Slate, and the author of Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever, and apparently already thinking about the second edition. John, always great to have you. Thank you very much.

John McWhorter: Thank you for having me, Brian.

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