The rock star Bono's campaigns against poverty and disease have won acclaim from the Bush administration. The U2 frontman's language is another matter.When a U2 song won a Golden Globe award in 2003, Bono, on a live broadcast, blurted out, "This is really, really f-ing brilliant!" The Federal Communications Commission declared his remark "shocking and gratuitous," a threat to "the well-being of the nation's children," because it employed "one of the most vulgar, graphic and explicit" words "in the English language."
Reversing a decades-old policy in which isolated or fleeting expletives generally went unpunished, the FCC started a crackdown on vulgar language in 2004. Under the Bono rule, the commission found programs violated indecency rules, including the ABC detective series "NYPD Blue," the CBS News "Early Show" and a PBS documentary on blues musicians. The rule applies only to broadcasts -- neither the Internet, cable nor satellite channels are subject to FCC content regulation.
Broadcasters (including Fox Television, a unit of News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal) challenged the policy, and a federal appeals court struck it down. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear the Bush administration's plea to reinstate the Bono rule. A key issue is whether the FCC had a "reasoned basis," as federal law requires, for its change in course.
To justify the Bono rule, the commissioners found that the F-word describes "sexual or excretory" functions and is "patently offensive" to "contemporary community standards." Courts should defer to the FCC, the administration's brief says, because the commissioners "studied" the "connotations of language" before determining that the word "invariably invokes a coarse sexual image."
The FCC says, however, that it conducted no formal study beyond the opinion it published announcing the expletive rule. A spokesman says the commission can't comment further while the case is pending.
At least one commissioner who voted for the Bono rule has since reconsidered. Michael Powell, who was chairman when the Bono rule was adopted, says he now regrets voting for it. "No reasonable person would believe" such an exclamation is "meant to titillate or be sexual in nature," he says.
Those who study language tend to agree. The FCC's finding is "absolute rubbish," says Jesse Sheidlower, North America editor at large for the Oxford English Dictionary and author of its entry for f-. "You can ask people if they think Bono is talking about sex, and I will guarantee you they will say no," says Mr. Sheidlower, whose book, "The F-Word," is a "historical glossary" of the word that provoked the Bono rule.
"Words change focus over time," he says. The word, which was used as far back as Elizabethan poetry, became "increasingly more acceptable" through the 20th century, Mr. Sheidlower says, particularly in war stories, such as Norman Mailer's first novel, "The Naked and the Dead" (published in 1948, it used the term "fug") and the 1970 motion picture "MASH," whose screenplay, by Ring Lardner Jr., won the Oscar.
"When we hear a word we briefly consider all of its possible meanings," says Bart Geurts, a semanticist at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. "One famous example is the English word 'bug.' If you hear that in context of a spy story, even if you're not aware of it, you consider an insect, you briefly consider that meaning and immediately reject it," says Prof. Geurts, whose scholarly essay, "Really F-ing Brilliant," takes its title from Bono's exclamation. He says that those who hear the vulgarism subliminally consider the literal meaning very briefly, "but then ignore it," he says.
Extras
Even so, he says, "whenever you have an ambiguity, the word's other senses may resonate."
Indeed, the current FCC chairman, Kevin Martin, said in a statement last year that the appeals court was "divorced from reality" in concluding that the word "does not invoke a sexual connotation."
Christopher Potts, a linguist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, observes that the FCC does not consider indecent other words that also can refer to sexual or excretory activity. The words the FCC singled out as inherently indecent "have their own magic," he says, that defies reasoned analysis.
"These words are taboo, and we as a society have invested ourselves in treating these words as taboo," he says, unlike other words that may have the same literal meaning. "It sounds very circular, but the underlying logic is that because it is taboo it should remain taboo."
Because the Supreme Court has found that adults have a First Amendment right to indecent materials, the Bono rule is predicated on protecting children from what the commissioners consider "the most objectionable, most offensive language." While the FCC asserted that use of such diction has increased over the airwaves, it cited no data suggesting the harm it causes children justifies government suppression of speech.
"There's no scientific evidence that children are harmed by fleeting expletives," says Timothy Jay, a psychology professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, North Adams, whose books on language include "Cursing in America."
A 2005 study of 200 college-age students asked how they learned to swear, and "the overwhelming majority said it was from their parents, other children or peers," says Prof. Jay, who has conducted research on children's use of vulgar language in playgrounds, baseball fields and other public places.
The lack of such data for children, researchers say, is because universities are unlikely to approve laboratory experiments that involve confronting kids with vulgar language. "That's not something you can measure," says Dale Kunkel, a University of Arizona communications professor who has researched the effect of televised violence and sexual content on children. The Bono rule seems based more on "moral-value issues than concern about harmful psychological affects that might be amenable to empirical evaluation," he says.
The Bush administration argues that the lack of such data for children is irrelevant. The FCC had no duty "to amass evidence that the broadcast of isolated expletives would be harmful to children," it says in its brief. "Courts have long recognized that exposure to indecent material risks harm to a child's psychological and moral development to an extent that makes it the proper subject of regulation."
Mr. Powell, the former FCC chairman, isn't so sure. "These indecency cases go way, way back," he says, "back to a time when there probably was a very, very different view about a lot of this content, and stuff that we would say everyday today that in the '50s or '60s you might not."
Federal law exhibits some tension, simultaneously prohibiting broadcast of "indecent language" while barring FCC interference with "free speech."
Indecency regulations only apply when children are likely to be in the audience, from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. Broadcasters are not sanctioned for expletives after 10 p.m., though in practice few do so for fear of upsetting advertisers.
In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the FCC could sanction a radio station for its afternoon broadcast of "Filthy Words," a George Carlin routine that, ironically, lampooned television censorship. In a concurrence, Justice Lewis Powell distinguished Mr. Carlin's "verbal shock treatment," which the majority found intentionally indecent, from "the isolated use of a potentially offensive word."
That distinction shaped FCC policy for the next three decades. A single, unrepeated expletive wasn't enough to trigger the indecency prohibition -- a depiction of "sexual or excretory organs or activities" that is "patently offensive" to "contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium." Since then, the FCC has cited mounting complaints to explain its crackdown.
As for Bono, he regrets he used the word at the time. "It's an uncool thing to do. I genuinely blew it," he wrote in an email to the Journal. "It was a truly joyful moment, where I regressed." But, he added, "I still think freedom of speech is more important than the risk that some idiot -- i.e. me on that occasion -- might abuse it."
