Posts Tagged ‘colorful expressions’

The Vulgar Tongue

In 2012, the Duchesses are starting the year off right. We’re setting a tone. We’re going to talk about bad words.

In the 1970s, George Carlin did a well-known comedy sketch entitled “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.” Some forty years later, you can say them on TV—at least as long as it’s cable.

One of the words that does not appear on George Carlin’s list, however, is “bloody” and yet this word was once considered so vulgar in certain contexts that it was not allowed to appear in print before sometime in the 1920s. It does appear in Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue but with no indication as to its acceptability.

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