[Ads-l] "motherfucker" goes mainstream

Dan Goncharoff thegonch at GMAIL.COM
Tue Mar 28 20:49:57 UTC 2017


I don't understand "not on pay cable either." Comedy Central is a cable
channel you have to pay for.

Late Nite with Stephen Colbert IS on a free station, and has an almost
nightly question of whether certain language will be bleeped.

DanG

On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 4:02 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> > On Mar 28, 2017, at 3:56 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> wrote:
> >
> > Gourmet Anthony Bourdain advertises his new CNN season with a spot that
> > shows penguins, then shows Bourdain bundled in a day-glo parka
> approaching
> > a barber's pole set in a polar desert.
> >
> > All the revered travel-&-chow host says is, "Bottom of the world,
> > mother******."
> >
> > But read his lips.
>
> Or read his books and draw the inference.  But haven’t cable hosts like
> Jon Stewart and Samantha Bee (and others, I’m sure) been emitting bleeped
> but lip-recoverable instances of “motherfucker” for a while?  Granted,
> they’re not on CNN, but not on pay cable either.  Maybe the generalization
> is that in a context in which you can get away with uttering “shit”
> uncensored, you can get away with uttering bleeped but recoverable
> “(mother)fuck(er)”.
>
> LH
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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