They Taught there's No Such Thing as Bad Words
Before I start — this one has some rough language in it. Carlin and Pryor did, and so does the story I'm going to tell. If that's not for you, I completely understand. Skip this one and read the first comment instead — I've put a clean version there. The lesson is the same. It just loses a little something without the original words. That's actually part of the point.
Before I start — this one has some rough language in it. Carlin and Pryor did, and so does the story I'm going to tell. If that's not for you, I completely understand. Skip this one and read the first comment instead — I've put a clean version there. The lesson is the same. It just loses a little something without the original words. That's actually part of the point.
I tell people sometimes that I learned from George Carlin and Richard Pryor. And I'm here to tell you that Eddie Murphy sat in the back of the class and took no notes.
I say that with genuine affection for Eddie Murphy. He is enormously talented. But there is a difference between a performer who uses language and one who has understood what language is for — and Carlin and Pryor had that understanding in a way that has shaped how I think about almost everything, including how I intend to run this campaign.
Carlin's argument — and it was an argument, not a routine — was that there are no bad words. There are bad thoughts. There are bad intentions. And there are words. The words themselves are tools. What matters is what you point them at and why. He made this case in the most legally consequential seven minutes in the history of American broadcasting. He lost the case in the Supreme Court. And in losing it, he proved the point — because the decision that went against him became the founding document of broadcast regulation. He lost and won at the same time. That's a Carlin outcome.
Pryor's argument was different, and to my mind deeper. Pryor used language to describe what America looked like from inside experiences that most of the people with the power to change it had never had. His words were not the subject. The subject was what happened to people when power decided they didn't count. The language was the scalpel he used to open it up so you could see the wound. He made you laugh because that was the only way he could get you to look. If he just showed you the wound, you'd turn away. But if he made you laugh first, you were already looking when the real thing arrived.
I spent a career in environments where language did specific work. A cardiac ICU is not a place where you have the luxury of careful euphemism. People are afraid. They are in pain. They are often angry — at their bodies, at the situation, at whoever happens to be in the room. I learned early that meeting people where they actually were, in the language they were actually using, was not unprofessional. It was the job.
I had a patient cursing one day in a way that was making the nurses in the room visibly uncomfortable. I turned around, looked him dead in the eye, and said: look, man, I'm forty-nine years old, and I have not yet met anybody who's going to lay down and die because you can say the F**K pretty good. So if you want something from these nurses, just be polite and ask. You don't have to beg anybody. But treat them as the human beings they are.
Nobody in the room expected that. Including me, to be honest — it came out before I'd finished deciding to say it. But it worked. The patient went quiet, looked at me for a moment, and then looked at the nurses and apologized. The room changed.
What Carlin and Pryor taught me — separately, across years of watching and listening — was that the argument was never really about the words. It was always about who gets to control the conversation, and what that control is being used to protect. When someone tells you a word is off-limits, the first question worth asking is: off-limits to whom, and why? When someone tells you a subject cannot be discussed, the next question is: who benefits from the silence?
I have never been comfortable with the version of professionalism that uses courtesy as a tool for avoidance. A nurse who speaks in careful clinical language to a patient who is terrified and needs plain human contact is not being professional. They are protecting themselves from the discomfort of real engagement. I understand the impulse. I have felt it. But I have sat at enough bedsides to know that the patient always knows the difference.
Carlin knew the difference. Pryor knew the difference. They both made careers out of refusing to pretend otherwise.
I never met either of them. I'm certain neither knew they were teaching me anything. But I've carried their argument for decades: language is a tool, the tool is as good or as bad as the intention behind it, and the people most invested in policing which tools you're allowed to use are almost always the people who benefit most from keeping the conversation exactly where it is.
This campaign talks about hard things in plain language. That is not an accident of style. It is a choice about what honesty requires.
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