7 Words You Can’t Say On The Internet (Without Starting A Flame War)
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
Today, I’ve decided to go ahead and do what every would-be and established comedian ought to be doing and pay respects to the late and brilliant George Carlin. This can go down one of two ways: you can either skip the videos below this paragraph and read it like any old post, or go ahead and click play on the one to the left to listen to the audio version of the 7 words you can’t say on the internet, which I felt compelled to make if only to stay true to the format of Carlin’s original 7 Words You Can’t Say on Television (conveniently placed directly to the right). Obviously both contain NSFW language, so if you’re at work, reading’s probably your best bet.
Here’s to you, George.
I love the Internet…it’s my teacher, my job, my lover with a thousand vaginas…so I want to talk about the Internet, and especially words on the Internet. Because besides pictures, movies, numbers, sounds, and flash animations of people dancing in silhouette about their APR, words are all we really have on the Internet.
We use them to tell people how we feel–usually about them–we use them to converse with people from all over the world about why their country is so shitty, and in general, we use whatever words we want. It’s liberating, right? “Fuck this!” “Gayyyyy.” Posts are padded with pricks and forums are filled with fucks. Not literally of course, that would require a lot of video embed.
But we say what we want, don’t we? We say things you can’t say on TV. Things George Carlin only said offstage, and that’s saying something. And we start to think that we can say anything, because really, who cares? It’s the motherfucking Internet. It’s not like school, not like the Internet can go “Hey! Who said that? Which one of you little snots called me a bowl of menstrual soup?”
BUT…there are those words. Those words that almost guarantee you’re going to spend the next eight hours getting death threats in your private messages folder. Things you say out of anger, when you’ve spent your lunch hour systematically deconstructing the arguments of a 14-year-old fuck who thinks he knows so goddamn much about the Spiderman mythos.
So unless you get off on hitting refresh all day, then there are words that you kind of…stop using on the Internet. Because let’s face it: unless you’re browsing through pornography, and that’s only about sixty percent of the time, there’s still a bare level of human decency that most people seem to expect. And there are seven words you just can’t post without risking becoming the one-man figurehead of the losing side of a flame war. You want to know what they are?
