Harvard Prof. Pinker: "What the F***?" (i.e., Fuck)
Oct 10th, 2007 by Paul Moor
When I first came to Europe as a mere stripling of twenty-five (can you think all the way back to 1949?), I couldn’t help noticing fairly early that when the French and the Germans – whether in print, on the air, or almost anywhere – meant the respective vernacular of fuck, they came right out and said their equivalent of fuck, with no simpering but no beating about the bush, either. It delights my noncomformist soul to discover that in the latest issue of The New Republic Steven Pinker, who rejoices in the impressive title of Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, has courageously tackled the entire Anglophone world’s No. 1 taboo head-on with a wonderful article he’s given the doubtless satirically intended title “What the F***?”, with those chaste asterisks highlighting a vestige of ancient Anglo-Saxon linguistic heritage you’ll find intact almost nowhere in either the American or the British media.
The choreographer Jerome Robbins once told me about an alleged first encounter between the flamboyantly noncomformist actress Tallulah Bankhead and Norman Mailer, whose brilliant first novel The Naked and the Dead had catapulted him into major fame at a time when even his otherwise naturalistically protrayed World War II GIs had to resort in print to the fatuous euphemism fug, which did at least serve to keep any censors off its publisher’s back. According to Jerry, Tallu greeted the new celebrity with “Ah yes – you’re that funny little man that doesn’t know how to spell fuck.”
Years ago, during a live radio panel program on the BBC, Kenneth Tynan, at that time the leading London theater critic (on The Observer, whence The New Yorker hired him away for an American stint that ended when his revulsion over the McCarthyite faction then running amok drove him back to England), caused a figurative earthquake at some logically appropriate point in a discussion of censorship by offhandedly dropping the most puissant of all four-letter words in any language known to me. Not long after my settling in San Francisco in 1982, during a similar call-in discussion on KQED, one of Frisco’s two National Public Radio outlets, the devil in me I usually keep under control took over and I called in for the express purpose of replicating Ken Tynan’s BBC scandal. I can’t recall which KQED staff-member led that discussion, but a protracted moment of stunned silence followed the dropping of my mischievous little bomb: momentarily I had indeed literally struck the poor wretch dumb. Whoopee Goldberg (would anybody reading this like to know the true source of her adopted first name?), then on the threshold of her local launching into showbiz orbit, pulled the same prank during another live radio interview I happened to hear, where her interviewer suavely took care of that with an unforced remark along the lines of “Well, now we at least have that out of the way.”
Prof. Pinker leads off his brilliant dissertation with this stunner:
“Fucking became the subject of congressional debate in 2003, after NBC broadcast the Golden Globe Awards. Bono, lead singer of the mega-band U2, was accepting a prize on behalf of the group and in his euphoria exclaimed, ‘This is really, really, fucking brilliant’ on the air. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is charged with monitoring the nation’s airwaves for indecency, decided somewhat surprisingly not to sanction the network for failing to bleep out the word. Explaining its decision, the FCC noted that its guidelines define ‘indecency’ as ‘material that describes or depicts sexual or excretory organs or activities’ and Bono had used fucking as ‘an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation’” – a semantic wiggle surely worthy of the Hohenzollerns at their most adroit.
Prof. Pinker then with this continuation reverts to the elevated scholarly niveau which has made Harvard Harvard:
“Cultural conservatives were outraged. California Representative Doug Ose tried to close the loophole in the FCC’s regulations with the filthiest piece of legislation ever considered by Congress. Had it passed, the Clean Airwaves Act would have forbade from broadcast the words ’shit’, ‘piss’, ‘fuck’, ‘cunt’, ‘asshole’, and the phrases ‘cock sucker’, ‘mother fucker’, and ‘ass hole’, compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).”
But why content yourselves with this frustrating teasing on my part when – as soon as I can say “Bravo, bravissimo, bravississimo!” to The New Republic for an unprecedented, potentially subscription-cancelling article – I can make that entire unabridged article available to anyone sufficiently prurient to click here?
