Obscenity on British TV

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:15 PM +0100 9/21/05, Michael Quinion wrote:
>Chris Waigl wrote:
>
>>  I'm more intrigued by the quotation marks. Presumably, Ken Tynan
>>  didn't use "f***" in 1965. That looks like wrongly ordered parentheses.
>>  And what happened to the practice of only asterisking the vowels?
>
>Famously, Ken Tynan did say "fuck" live on BBC television, on 13 November
>1965, during a discussion on a fairly dreadful satirical programme called
>"BBC3" (the second channel, BBC2, had recently opened). What he actually
>said was "I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word 'fuck'
>would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden."

Well, then, he didn't really use the word 'fuck' live, he merely
*mentioned* it, a distinction on which Quine, inter alia, would have
insisted.

Larry