What's in a Word? George Carlin Was Wrong About Which Words Are Dirty

Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits - are they truly offensive?

George Carlin’s famous routine, the seven dirty words you can’t say on TV, was a brazen counter-culture challenge disguised as entertainment. Carlin wasn’t chasing a cheap laugh or seeking infamy for its own sake. He was boldly pushing back on the arbitrariness of social norms and obscenity laws rooted in antiquated Victorian morality, impacting a society that had long since moved on from outdated mores, believing that if bad words weren’t spoken, then society’s thoughts would be pure. The absurdity of controlling human nature with binary thinking made Carlin’s challenge inevitable.

Humans, as naturally curious beings, are always experimenting with novel approaches to problem-solving. Occasionally, power brokers are convinced that laws targeting morality are gifts to society, but more often, when trying to irrationally confine human nature, reveal Narcissus entranced by his reflection in the pool, cloaking vanity as public service. Anthony Comstock, the anti-vice activist and Postal Inspector, was the architect behind the laws that jailed legends like Carlin and Lenny Bruce when they dared question whether society was truly better off or merely being nannied into avoiding the discomfort of an unexamined life.

I’m all for laws and rules as they are necessary to keep the wheels from falling off society. What I’m not here for is the indulgence of giving gravitas to someone’s vehicle of deflection to avoid working through emotional discomfort, insisting their dictums are the panacea for what ails society because it’s based on virtue. It isn’t virtue grounded in transformative change; it’s virtue signaling.

In my opinion, society was incorrect labeling Carlin’s word choices dirty in the first place.

Swearing, unlike language, is housed in the limbic system within the basal ganglia and amygdala, while language is located in the frontal and temporal lobes. Scientists believe swearing is a type of distress call, which would explain its location in the oldest region of a modern brain. Since humans have the ability for higher reasoning, which can override our more primitive responses, humans have been able to develop language beyond starting every story with “There once was a girl from Nantucket.”

It’s society that determines meaning, changing something that is simply a definition or descriptor into bearing an implied morality by its mere utterance. Carlin’s challenge to the status quo, eventually making its way to the Supreme Court in a landmark case, has changed swearing from being held as a moral failing to more of a minor character flaw.

Fricatives, maledictions, and expletives have been around since the dawn of humans. Anyone who has ever read the Canterbury Tales in school will tell you that the Old English isn’t too difficult to translate because many of the words Carlin used to push the envelope are in there too. The Canterbury Tales is the 14th-century equivalent of MAD Magazine, with goofy stories and dirty jokes—something every middle schooler relishes.

Carlin’s words held up an unflinching mirror to society’s discomfort with accountability and honesty—one it couldn’t look away from.

The truth is, there is no real power in a ‘dirty’ word; they are linguistic red herrings, neutral descriptors that take on meaning solely by interpretation created both by the collective and the individual. Carlin’s choice of words commanded power only because society gave it power, declaring it a litmus test of virtue to stay in good standing with the ‘tribe,’ and deserved to be pushed back on.

“There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feelings as “moral indignation,” which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue. The “indignant” person has for once the satisfaction of despising and treating a creature as “inferior,” coupled with the feeling of his own superiority and rightness.” - Eric Fromm

Fromm was saying one can’t be both morally outraged and indignant at the same time. Fromm would call it virtue signaling. I call it gaslighting, which isn’t always about distorting someone else’s reality; sometimes it’s a distortion of one’s own reality to protect a fragile, inauthentic identity built like a house of cards. Instead of embracing life—warts, brass rings, and all—tremendous amounts of energy are wasted hyper-vigilantly protecting that fragile stack of cards from even the smallest breeze to prevent the collapse of a sense of self.

The anarchistic obscenity laws put all their might into repression and none into self-reflection about why there was a need for such a law in the first place. Was it truly to uplift, or was it to suppress and hide from confronting an uncomfortable issue? To Fromm’s point, just because you don’t say fuck doesn’t mean you aren’t fucking someone over. You are still culpable. This isn’t neurotype-specific either; this is the human condition.

Hurt someone behind their back? Culpable. Avoid feelings because they’re uncomfortable? Culpable. Fail to make a repair? Absolutely culpable. If you can’t say you’re sorry, can’t take accountability, and, most importantly, lack the courage to take action and do a proper repair, you’re culpable as fuck.

In today’s world, the true 'dirty words' aren’t obscenities. They’re virtues society avoids at all costs: humility, acknowledgment, vulnerability, empathy, accountability, repair, and action.

If they weren’t so dirty then people wouldn’t spend lifetimes, often destroying their lives in the process, avoid tackling them head on. Those words hold power; significant power, because they can make or break a life.

These aren’t just words—they’re the foundation for living a life of meaning and connection.

“An honorable man is fair even to his enemies; a dishonorable man is unfair even to his friends!”

― Mehmet Murat ildan

Calling someone a shithead or being called a shithead truly means nothing especially if reframed in our interpretation as nothing more than a descriptor instead of focusing on how it feels. As Epictetus reminds us, real power is in the reframe; "It's not things that upset us but our judgments about things." What if we responded with curiosity, asking why the person chose to express themselves that way and what they were trying to communicate?

Instead of focusing on how it makes you feel, try embracing self-reflection instead of immediately becoming the noble victim. If becoming the victim is the first place someone lands, bypassing self-reflection, then that is the real issue that needs addressing.

Once curiosity enters the room, judgment leaves creating space for a resolution. Curiosity brings the pre-frontal back online overriding the limbic system. Perfect diction or a thesaurus like vocabulary is not an invisible cloak from personal accountability for how someone interacts with others.

One definition of dirty is feeling regretful, ashamed or guilty for failing to conform to some moral virtue. Personal interpretation has the potential to unfairly brand someone a bad person because of someone else refusing to own their personal anathemas. Dirty is a convenient way of sweeping disquiet and uncomfortable feelings under the rug to avoid confronting them.

Just like sex and bodily functions had the ability to make people uncomfortable in a repressed society, so does the mere mention of being accountable in our current era where everything has become a malady or disorder diluting resilience and interfering with the mechanisms that create connection.

We’re creating an army of victims sworn to uphold the dogma of learned helplessness. This is especially prevalent when accountability is within the context of needing to make a repair because someone’s actions hurt someone else. It takes courage to be humble enough to admit wrong doing and taking the bold step of fixing a mistake. Mistakes create a swell of emotions such as shame and guilt waging an internal storm within ourselves as our lizard brain wars with our rational brain.

And it’s not helping that the onslaught of mental health lightweights, especially in the self-help industry, with prestidigitation, performing their sleight of untrained hands on an unsuspecting public by misusing clinical language, creating huge trends of misinformation. It’s starting to cause more harm than good, interfering with our ability to build deeper connections with others. We’re more fragmented than we’ve ever been.

Take for example the word boundary. Boundary has a very specific clinical meaning but now, every time someone’s feelings are hurt their boundary is being violated. Is it really, or, under the tutelage of someone light on understanding the nuances, offers it as an escape hatch when what is truly needed is a deep dive on why the strong resistance to being vulnerable? Instead they’re told to enforce those boundaries without ever having to confront how their actions impact others and that they and their lack of honest self-reflection is indeed a problem if not the problem? Boundaries aren’t their problem, the wall of resistance to address it is.

I’m going to throw a splash of cold holy water on the demon of avoidance and watch the twitching and writhing that comes from the burn that only truth can bring: the connection that is sought will never come to pass without first taking the bold and unavoidable step of sitting in the discomfort of uncomfortable truths about oneself. This is how one builds resilience - by learning how to be fearlessly vulnerable. It’s not just about making the commitment to do better either, but actually taking action and doing better. That vulnerability isn’t going to knit itself a sweater - you’re going to have to learn how to knit one, pearl two that together yourself in order to make it knit it into the essence that is you.

While we’re at it, let’s add curiosity to the list of dirty words because many seem loathe to even entertain the idea that there’s another side to the story and that both parts are essential to understand before formulating a response. Instead, too many just hubristically rely on their big fish, small pond repository of knowledge and society reinforces this constantly with all the psychobabble propagated over social media. But hey, let’s just forget that victims are left in the wake of this entitlement and cowardice. It’s much more important that everyone feels good about themselves even if it is built on delusion.

There’s a difference between compassion and enabling - one is teaching a man to fish by learning the skills of emotional regulation and self-awareness; the other is giving a man a fish by providing an accommodation with no responsibility placed on them that if they have capacity to do better then it is a necessity that they do so. Instead, we celebrate fragility and weakness mistakenly calling it vulnerability when in reality it’s watering down resilience as a nice to have instead of the must have it should be. We have bastardized pride too, turning it into a dirty word by hijacking it, favoring when it means stubborn resistance at all costs instead of amplifying the alternative meaning of feeling elated after overcoming a difficult obstacle. We do this with every ‘you go!’ when someone is clearly weaponizing boundaries or tossing out the label of narcissist like kids marching in a parade throwing candy as they pass by the crowds.

To truly stand out, build an identity rooted in virtue. Stop being the villain not just in your own story but in other people’s too; be the hero instead. Lead by example by becoming the embodiment of good character. No one will ever be able to take that away because it’s built on a foundation of truth. Truth can withstand gale force winds.

These "dirty" words aren't just concepts; they are the actions that define character.

Seneca said it best, “Tis not the belly’s hunger that costs so much but its pride”. He’s right; we’ve become a society afraid of our own shadow of responsibility and desperately needs to check its own privilege with regard to the over-pathologizing everything and creating a labyrinth of victimhood almost impossible to escape from. Even the slightest slights completely paralyze someone’s ability to thrive. Slights that would be barely perceptible to those who have endured far worse trauma but came out victorious letting resilience scab over their pain. Those who hold onto their victimhood as an identity, seeing it as some badge of honor are the weakest link in the chain. Friction is needed to polish a rock and hard times are needed to build resilience. Here’s the stark truth about hanging on to a minor slight and letting it dictate perception - it’s a convenient vehicle for one to never take accountability or responsibility for one’s life choices. Shifting blame is always a convenient and readily available scapegoat because accountability is such a dirty, filthy word that to even think of it, let alone actually do it, seems to be sin for the ages in our modern world.

Talk about losing the plot.

Stop worshiping at the altar of The Martyred Victim—you are neither. Clinging to moral indignation out of pride is like consuming fistfuls of empty calories and wondering why you can’t lose weight.

I believe in compassion, I believe in forgiveness but I don’t believe in it in a reciprocity vacuum. If you want to receive it, you also need to learn to give it - and not by some personal definition that puts restrictions and limits on it to ameliorate its sting but rather by its proper, literal definition.

Two things can be true at the same time: space can be held for compassionately understanding the why behind a fear of vulnerability, but space also has to be made for real change. There’s no such thing as transformative growth happening in a bubble wrapped environment. Without vulnerability, there is no connection, without connection, there is no joy.

The opposite of bad behavior isn’t good behavior, it’s connection which leads to forgiveness and healing. Honest self-awareness is the key to discharging the negative energy of avoidance. Avoidance is just another word for loss and follows your life like a grim reaper: Death of dreams, death of progress, death of relationships, friendships; of the ability to feeling the joy of life. You will never escape the karma that unaccountability brings, not because you either inadvertently or even intentionally caused the pain but rather from the karma that comes from the deliberate choice of not making a proper repair. Like the sign says: if you break it you buy it; you break something in a relationship, you fix it.

Think for a moment about the antonyms of the ‘dirty’ words: The opposite of humility is arrogance, of acknowledgment is dismissiveness, of vulnerability is superiority, of empathy is judgmental, of accountability is blame, of repair is destruction, and of action is stonewalling. Each of these ‘dirty’ words are powerhouses to fortify and solidify connection by transforming pain into utility, sorrow into joy, loss into security. The power of hope and joy these ‘dirty’ words bring is limitless.

By contrast, their antonyms are truly dirty words and are a stark contrast to words that elevate the human spirit and foster connection. Filled with aggression, anger, destruction and hurt, the one thing that inter-connects these antonyms is the victim left in the aftermath. Every one of those antonyms is some flavor of hate. And if that isn’t dirty, I don’t know what is.

Be a part of the vanguard championing the virtues that elevate humanity and rejecting mediocrity just like Carlin did with a defiant and unapologetic 'Fuck yeah!