George Carlin’s 7 Dirty words
George Carlin, comedian, actor, writer, social critic, and 5-time Grammy Award winner was one of the most famous counterculture comedians in history. In 1972, he generated a list of the 7 dirty words you can’t say on television. Nearly 50 years later, those words are used in literature 28 times more than they were in the 1950’s according to researchers who evaluated thousands of American English books looking for Carlin’s list of words. And they found them, plenty of them. The increase in profanity is only a part of the expanding cultural trend toward free expression and individualism. Later in life, Carlin narrated the Thomas the Tank Engine series in order to show people a different side of him, obviously, without the 7 dirty words. Oh, how times have changed!
