"The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book".  ~Walt Whitman

THE “B” WORD IS BALDERDASH!

by

Joe Sinclair

When someone mentions the "B" word, three words used to spring to my mind: BITCH, BOWDLER*, and BLEEP.  I have just added a fourth: BALDERDASH.

It never ceases to amaze me that the word “bitch” is apparently regarded as a seriously unacceptable breach of propriety in America, while it is considered little more than a mild epithet in England, where it has no deeper connotation (except as the female of “dog”) than does “mare”, “cow”, or “sow”, all of which might equally be used to express displeasure with the distaff side.

But I have only to tune in to one of those prime time American TV shows, Judge Judy say, to find the “B” word constantly bowdlerised to its initial letter, or "bleeped out", or – since, in my case, my hearing requires the use of subtitles – blanked out totally on the screen.

Even more ridiculous, in fact, than the initialization of the word, is its metonymic adaptation to make it acceptable, when everyone knows what is meant and the entire word is echoing through our brains. 

The censorship of public broadcast language is most prevalent (at least amongst the major broadcasting nations) in America and Japan, and to a lesser extent England.  France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and Italy, for example, are much more liberal towards swearing, more averse to censorship and, possibly, more inclined to avoid obscenity in the first place.

In America the Federal Communications Commission, the official body responsible for protecting the public from this perceived menace to its morals, has for many years been involved in a number of debates and disputes over its censorship's apparent conflict with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution - the one dealing with freedom of expression.  This has involved a number of rulings by the United States Supreme Court, of which the most current is the definition of offensiveness where:

• An average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the material, as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;

• The material must depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable law; and

• The material, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

This clearly goes way beyond the brief we have set ourselves for this article, namely the objection to the use of certain words in the media. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court decision was made at least partly if not mainly as the result of a George Carlin sketch.  In 1972 George Carlin released an album of stand-up comedy in which he described "seven words you can never say on television".  These are shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. When he subsequently performed his routine in Milwaukee he was arrested for disturbing the peace. A year later he performed a similar routine that was broadcast uncensored by station WBAI .without repercussion.

A George Carlin You-Tube clip featuring the seven-letter word routine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqvLTJfYnik

Our "B" word, unsurprisingly, does not appear in the list.  Later, however, the comedian Lenny Bruce compiled a list of his own, six of which coincided with Carlin's. Of the two additional words on Bruce's list, one was a "B" word of his own, namely Balls.  Personally I find balls as inoffensive as bitch.  Again, this may be a simple sociolinguistical distinction between the UK and the US.

So who decides what is obscene and what is not?  Since the mid-nineteenth century the definition (framed on the results of earlier court cases) has been "whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall."

In the United States, following on from what we stated earlier, the courts have held that indecent material is protected by the First Amendment and cannot be banned entirely. It may, however, be restricted in order to avoid being broadcast during times of the day when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.  The watershed⁽¹⁾ is delimited by the hours of 6.00 am and 10.00 pm.  Outside these hours children, whom this regulation is designed to protect, may be supposed to be asleep.  This is rather wider than has been determined for the United Kingdom.  I guess our children are deemed to need more sleep than their cousins across the "Pond".

Moving eastwards now, we learn from the news agency Pravda [July 2013] that Russia, too, has decided to ensure its children are protected from the dangers of exposure to indecency, obscenity and profanity.

[Click on thumbnail for full size picture]

Green is legal

Yellow is legal with some restrictions

Red is illegal

Grey data is unavailable

^*  Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) has contributed his name to posterity, having produced and published an expurgated version of the entire works of William Shakespeare.  Nowaays the adjectival  "bowdlerise" is commonly associated with censorship of literature, films and television.

⁽¹⁾  This is what we Brits call it.  To the Americans it is a "Safe Harbour".