By MICHAEL BRICK
ACROSS the land, word-bombs are falling.
In May a New York television reporter who apparently thought he was off the air lit into two men who had intruded on his shot, broadcasting a word-bomb to the five boroughs.
This month a card player at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas made his name by launching a word-bomb across the table early in the tournament.
This weekend "The Aristocrats," a documentary film about a spectacularly crude joke, opened in New York and Los Angeles, strafing the coasts with 86-minute cluster-word-bomb raids.
And all that art, if you want to call it that, reflects life, if you want to call it that. In the schoolyards kids bomb the pencils, the books and the teachers' dirty looks. Outside office buildings smokers bomb their bosses, and nonsmokers bomb the smokers. On the streets T-shirts bomb milk in favor of marijuana, bomb the space between the words New York and City and even bomb you just because "we're from Texas."
Even the culture's hallowed spaces are no longer bomb-free zones. Baseball players can be seen on television mouthing inaudible bombs in the dugout. The vice president of the United States bombed a colleague on the Senate floor.
For cultural Chicken Littles, these are heady days. It is easy to make a case that the particular word-bomb on all these lips - that undefeated heavyweight champ of profanity, that King of the Cuss Words - is so commonly heard now that it's moving toward ho-hum status. Once the word gets in, the argument goes, there could be no line of defense against all the other words known by their first letters. "You know what I blame this on the breakdown of?" as Moe Syzlak of "The Simpsons" once asked. "Society."
But now polite society (if you want to call it that) seems to be taking a stand. While some profane words gain tacit acceptance over time, repetition is having the opposite effect for the word-bomb. For every inroad it makes (peppering the scripts of HBO programming like grapeshot, for example), the old word-bomb is encountering some pushback. That broadcast reporter, Arthur Chi'en of WCBS-TV, lost his job. That poker player, Mike Matusow, known as the Mouth, was banished from the table for 40 minutes, losing forced bets. And AMC Entertainment, which owns the country's second-largest chain of movie houses, declined to book "The Aristocrats," effectively keeping the movie and its word-bomb payload from 3,500 screens.
And with each round of back and forth, the dual standard seems to come into ever sharper relief. Take the clunky construction "word-bomb" itself. I've made it up as a stand-in for a well-known hyphenated term that refers to an actual profanity. In use for at least a decade, the original hyphenated term (which begins with the first letter of the profanity and ends with "bomb") gives a knowing wink to the actual profanity's paradoxical place as a taboo in wide circulation.
All this shorthand in letter-word form may be infantilizing, but it illustrates a kind of cultural cognitive dissonance over when, where and whether to use profanity. Among some people, in some social settings, the well-timed word-bomb is a knowing bit of transgression meant to flash the message: I'm no square. It shows a streak of rebelliousness, even if a mild one, in a world where rebellion has few outlets. In other words, it shows a certain cool.
"When we want to break the rules," said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at Stanford University, "you have these words."
But when those same transgressors get to the office, they will most likely watch their tongues, at least away from the water cooler, as they uphold the polite-society taboo. "The idea that there are no rules is a big mistake," Mr. Nunberg said. It's just that "the rules are more flexible, and we break them more often."
EXAMPLES of deliberate omission abound: The New Yorker and this newspaper both address an educated readership, but the magazine prints the actual profanity, while The New York Times does not. And very rarely does the paper print those obvious, winking, letter-word stand-ins. As The Times's two-page stylebook entry on obscenity says, "An article should not seem to be saying, 'Look, I want to use this word but they won't let me.' "
"Word-bomb" does not directly refer to any particular vulgarity in an easily identifiable manner; so problem solved for the newspaper. But score a point, too, for the deepening lines of the dual standard, polite society's claim on the preservation of civility.
In the Victorian age, women went through life pretending that they had never heard curse words. It was not long, though, before acknowledgment began to serve a purpose, like demonstrating level-headedness through restraint from profanity.
Turn-of-the-century efforts to ban profanity made an open secret no secret at all. By 1900 a criminal defendant in Washington was acquitted on the ground of "justifiable profanity." With that, the stage was set for the dual standard to come. Soon people were throwing word-bombs under the thin veil of acronyms like fubar and snafu, and from there it is not hard to trace the path to Lenny Bruce and George Carlin.
But a funny thing happened on the way toward mainstream acceptance, a point that won't come until middle-class families routinely word-bomb the corn flakes across the breakfast table. Through battles couched in comedy, then the vilification and triumphant return of network censors, the chasm between what is acceptable from one place to the next only grew wider.
"In the workplace, where so many of us spend our time, we are on the verge of a neo-Victorian age," said Anthony J. Oncidi, a Los Angeles labor lawyer with the firm Proskauer Rose. "Anybody can now take the position that they are subjected to a hostile work environment, and a hostile work environment can be made up of profanity."
In one case, now before the California State Supreme Court, an assistant who worked in the writing room for the television show "Friends" based a sexual harassment complaint in part on profanity. A lower court had said that a defense of "creative necessity" may apply, Mr. Oncidi said.
Blaming the lawyers is always fun, but there is something else going on here. In an age of word-bombing, clean language becomes a more powerful tool to make a statement - of grace, calm, femininity or fustiness, you pick.
"In advertising you hear it all the time," said Linda Kaplan Thaler, the chief executive of the Kaplan Thaler Group, an advertising agency, and a conscientious objector to word-bombing. "This is an agency that is run by women, and we weren't brought up to talk like truck drivers."
Truck drivers, sailors or pirates; it doesn't matter. The stand-ins for riffraff change, but plenty of people are still genuinely offended by profanity, not posing. James Bovino, chairman of the real estate investment firm Whiteweld, Barrister & Brown, says he watches only G-rated movies and has fired people for cursing. That's walking the walk, and it sends a message as unmistakable as a bow tie's.
Office work has always called for pretty reserved language, but the establishment of profanity rules at the World Series of Poker marks new territory for the anti-word-bomb campaign. The image of the card table calls to mind pictures of men, probably with cigars, possibly armed, cursing up a storm. But at the World Series of Poker, words can lead to suspensions, and the word-bomb, said Dave Curley, a spokesman for the event, is "an automatic."
The rule, he said, was not set as a concession to television.
"If it's on television, it can be bleeped," Mr. Curley said. "We want to safeguard the dignity and integrity of everyone who's playing."
To some, this darkening of dividing lines is misplaced, prudishness masquerading as dignity. Royal S. Brown, chairman of the European languages and literature department at Queens College and an avowed word-bomber, offered an elegiac defense of profanity.
"It's a kind of poetry that gets beyond what Hamlet called the pales and forts of normal discourse," Mr. Brown said. "Given the high Puritan tradition, the sort of anti-life and anti-body Puritan tradition, I'm guessing that slang words for body parts and body functions and bodily activities such as sex are never going to be fully acceptable in this society."
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