Seven words you can never say on television. I was 19 years old when the Supreme Court affirmed the FCC’s authority to censor George Carlin on the public airwaves and being in radio school then, the case was used to hammer home all the phony, hypocritical “ethics” I’d be expected to uphold during my illustrious broadcast career. His suit woke me up to the inviolability of self-expression, the attendant danger in civility and the lengths authoritarians will take to make their own senseless fear yours and mine. George Carlin was the first living figure to show me he gets it, that the forces telling us there is a correct way to perceive and speak are trying to shape reality, and of course the correct way just happens to be theirs. I read in a comment thread today that whenever people invoke the overused cliche about truth to power what they mean is George Carlin. For that he will be missed. From his bit on soft words:
I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation.
For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I’ll give you an example of that. There’s a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It’s when a fighting person’s nervous system has been stressed to its absolute peak and maximum. Can’t take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap.
In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was seventy years ago. Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell shock!
Battle fatigue. Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, we’re up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car. Then of course, came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it’s no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ll bet you if we’d of still been calling it shell shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I’ll betcha. I’ll betcha.
He continues here, and will forever on youtube:
I miss him already. George Carlin: American Radical, RIP and thanks for the memories ~
Writhe Safely 
“Save the Planet” is also good.
Awesome tribute the Mr. Carlin!
Thanks LOL
re:”save the planet”
“Worried about everything” people are terrible, but to think humans (intelligence/creative ability to kill) can not seriously screw up the planet earth is foolish.
From unlimited DDT use, ozone layer depletion, or accidentally fertilizing all plants with GMO’s that kill off critical insects such as a bees or butterfly’s, to nuclear power planets/storage facilities that will eventually break and leak highly radioactive waste into the water supply/food cycle.
That being said I still LOVE Carlin .
you miss the point: the only thing people do is kill themselves.
he says: “the planet is fine, the people are fucked.”
yes, einstein said when the bees are gone, people have 4 years left.
yes, cell phones fuck around with the bees and their ability to navigate.
who gives a shit?
not the planet, my friend, not the planet.
the planet won’t give a shit about plastic and/or bees, nor the most arrogant species of them all: the homo sapiens.
get a life and understand the order of importance is this:
sun – without it, none of this shit can be.
plants – without them, there ain’t no air, so none of the animal kingdom, oh so evolved, can be.
in other words, the only thing animals do is take energy and convert it into shit, literally.
we are machines that take energy and convert it to waste. the plants know how to take that waste and make it back into oxygen at least, so the fucking animal kingdom can continue to pillage and make shit, day in day out, while proclaiming the supreme beauty of their life.
how does it make you feel as a mighty evolved vegetarian to realize that in fact the GREEN REALM is superior in every way to the BROWN GENERATING REALM?
the arrogance of the human species is unparalleled in this universe…
“Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”
Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions