The cunning linguist: George Carlin's literary genius.

• Author: Beckerman, Marty

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When George Carlin died in June at age 71, almost every obituary cited the comedian's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV" routine in the first paragraph, if not the first sentence. The monologue led to a 1972 arrest in Milwaukee on obscenity charges (later dismissed). More famously, it led to a 1978 ruling at the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the Federal Communications Commission's authority to punish broadcasters for airing "indecent" material. Carlin once admitted that he was "perversely ... proud" of the federal legal drama that his dirty words caused.

But George Carlin's comedy was not simply about dirty words. It was about the English language and our collective fear of it. The man used more expletives than Howard Stern, but his obsession was linguistics, not lasciviousness. As Carlin told CNN in 2004, "Ill hadn't chosen the career of being a performer, I think linguistics would have been a natural area that I'd have loved--to teach it, probably. Language has always fascinated me."

Carlin was especially fascinated with the ways we blunt our language for the sake of our comfort. He despised our watered-down sexual descriptions and ethnic categories, and hated the delicate euphemisms we use when speaking about aging and death. Such terms, he believed, were real-life manifestations of George Orwell's Newspeak, words and phrases intended to obscure reality, numb the mind, and discourage criticism. "By and large," he once said, "language is a tool for concealing the truth."

As much as Carlin loathed theology, war, greed, and hypersensitivity, he was most disgusted when religious puritans, the military, corporations, and politically correct "classroom liberals" mangled the language for the purpose of soothing the masses. When I saw Carlin perform in the '90s, the biggest laugh of the night came from his observation that "the unlikely event of a water landing," discussed in every preflight safety lecture, sounds suspiciously like "crashing into the fucking ocean."

In fact, Car[in was disgusted with the mangling of English for any reason. He ridiculed cliches. ("You will not hear me say 'bottom line,' 'game plan,' 'role model,' 'scenario,' or 'hopefully,'" he declared in 1990. "I will not 'kick back,' 'mellow out,' or 'be on a roll'! I will not 'go for it,' and I will not 'check it out.' I don't even know what 'it' is!")...