From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

A word for excretion.

Bob Garfield is away this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

For urination.

For having sex.

For breasts.

And three words still, so radioactive, we can't even describe them.

Comedian George Carlin died last Sunday, not exactly breaking news by now, but we couldn't resist the urge to talk about those words we're not supposed to talk about, what the Federal Communications Commission calls indecency.

The ones Carlin mentioned in his now infamous stand-up act from the 1970s,

which became the subject of a Supreme Court case after New York City radio station played the

routine uncensored live over the air at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. In FCC versus Pacifica,

the court ruled against the radio station, stating that broadcast media have, quote, limited First Amendment protection, in part because they are, quote, uniquely accessible to children.

Glenn Garvin is TV critic for the Miami Herald.

He says that broadcast or not, TV today is littered with the words that Carlin said you can't say on TV.

The show Deadwood on HBO used the F words so often that a website actually began counting them and working out what it called the FPM.

That's F words per minute.

And over three seasons, it averaged 1.56 F words per minute, which is a pretty

impressive total, really.

Of course, now it doesn't even take a subscription to cable TV to hear at least some of the

words from Carlin's routine. I've noticed them popping up on broadcast channels now and

again. They've done so rather infamously the last few years, particularly from the mouths of

Hollywood celebrities sort of commandeering the airwaves during award shows and things like

...