"Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?" he asked. "If a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?" Or this particular head-scratcher: "What if there were no hypothetical questions?"

But never mind all that: When Carlin died this summer at age 71, it became apparent that America's cantankerous court jester was largely defined by just seven dirty words.

Cursing 101-07
On July 21, 1972, Carlin was arrested in Milwaukee for "disorderly conduct"—conduct that amounted to unleashing a recklessly profane performance in front of a "large gathering including minor children," according to the police report. During his performance, Carlin allegedly used a book's worth of profanities (most dutifully reprinted in the report), including several derivations of the f-word.

We can only assume the curse-inflected performance included Carlin's new, soon-to-be career-defining sketch called "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television"—a monologue that would later appear on Carlin's Class Clown album released a few months later. From that point on, Carlin and crass became irrevocably joined.

It's not like we had never heard these dirty words before Carlin. Blue language is almost as old as language itself: One of Carlin's sleazy seven actually made its way into the King James Version of the Bible (2 Kings 18:27) long before the comedian thought about adding it to his shtick. And high school students have long been exposed to such profanities as "zounds!" in Shakespeare's work—terms that would've made Elizabethan audiences quail.

What Carlin was really critiquing, though, was the weight and power we give to certain words—words he sarcastically said "will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war." Why be so concerned about simple words? Why are these words so inherently offensive?

"There are no bad words," he contended. "Bad thoughts. Bad intentions."

Carlin's skit came at a time when America was already questioning censorship and its national sense of morality. Woodstock was still very much in our collective consciousness. The Hayes Code, which required all motion pictures to adhere to certain broad moral standards, was washed away in 1968, to be replaced by the current ratings system. The illustrated book The Joy of Sex became a national phenomenon, furthering the Sexual Revolution. Is it any wonder that America's ideal of "free speech" became a call, in some circles, for completely unfettered speech?

In 1973, New York radio station WBAI-FM broadcast Carlin's "Filthy Words" routine (a precursor to his more famous "Seven Dirty Words" bit) uncensored to its afternoon audience. When a listener complained, the Federal Communications Commission sent a letter of reprimand to the station—a letter that WBAI challenged legally. It took another five years for the courts to sort out whether free-speech rights would trump traditional standards of decency: The Supreme Court finally decided that the broadcast was "indecent" and declared that such material should be sequestered to time slots after 10 p.m.

A Curse on Generations
Turns out, though, that Carlin was wrong. Viewers can hear most of the comedian's seven words every night of the week on television—as long as they subscribe to HBO.

Carlin actually helped launch that premium channel in 1977 with the first of 14 stand-up performances on the network. This inaugural monologue included his "Seven Dirty Words" sketch and helped brand HBO as television-on-the-edge. It's a rep that HBO has cultivated ever since through such shows as The Sopranos, Sex and the City and Deadwood, and it's inspired a bevy of copycats. It's also led many broadcast stations to bemoan the FCC's restrictions on the public airwaves—mumbling that they, too, need Carlin's sleazy seven to compete with the premium channels.

Network executives, perhaps, feel increasingly out of step with the wider world. Movies can apparently use a smattering of f- and s-words and still secure a PG-13 rating. Many of the country's most popular musical artists—from Lil Wayne on down—curse with abandon on their albums. The Internet—the wide open forum of free expression that it is—has become a no-holds-barred haven for profanity.

"While the Internet hasn't quite absolved us of all concerns over decorum, it does provide a space of cultural exchange where our most impolite instincts may circulate freely," writes Hua Hsu in Slate. "It has so thoroughly decentralized and complicated how we communicate, that concern over profanity seems quaint, even outdated."

Jose Santiago, WBAI's current news director, told The New York Times that "the fact that [Carlin's] seven dirty words emanated from here is kind of a source of pride." Indeed, many cultural provocateurs would very much like to see the FCC and other watchdogs go away. It's time for the free expression Carlin advocated—replete with four-letter words.

"We should be allowed to say what we want to say," says Paul Mooney, who wrote for Richard Pryor, to ABC News. "Too many people are trying to control us, period. That's the problem. This is insanity. It's double talk. And I don't want to hear any double talk, I want straight talk."

You'd think that today's culture would have been something of a linguistic utopia for Carlin. Strange, then, that the comedian seemed to grow more bitter as society "progressed." Carlin, an avowed atheist, not only lost his faith in God, but seemingly in man as well.

"I sort of gave up on this whole human adventure a long time ago," he was quoted as saying in Time magazine. "Divorced myself from it emotionally. I think the human race has squandered its gift, and I think this country has squandered its promise. ... And I don't think it's fixable."

The Curse of the Commonplace
Carlin told us that words were just words, and he wondered aloud why we imbued some of them with so much power. Carlin, I think, actually knew the answer: Words, as it turns out, define our truths. They define what we treasure and hold dear. Words are power. They carry with them love and hate, war and peace. Swear words have their own particular power. People use them to shock, to appall, to get folks to pay attention. Why else would this linguistic comedian have used so many of them?

But when cursing becomes commonplace, does it lose even that questionable benefit?

"The supply of genuinely offensive language has dwindled almost to nothing as the 20th century comes to an end," wrote Slate columnist Alan Ehrenhalt in 1996—an age perhaps almost prudish by today's standards. "The currency of swearing has been inflated to the brink of worthlessness. When almost anything can be said in public, profanity ceases to exist in any meaningful way at all."

Ehrenhalt went on to make a poignant observation in his column: "To profane something ... one must believe in it." Sex—once so powerful and mysterious a force, is now a mere biological act for much of society. Religion—the unwilling and sometimes unwitting source of much of our world's most enduring profanities—is being shunted to the background. Most of us say we believe in God, but that doesn't stop many of us from taking His name in vain. We take nothing very seriously anymore.

We owe that, at least in part, to a comic.

"Healthy societies need a decent supply of verbal taboos and prohibitions, if only as yardsticks by which ordinary people can measure and define themselves," Ehrenhalt wrote. "Forbidden language is one of the ways we remind children that there are rules to everyday life, and consequences for breaking them. When we forget this principle, or cease to accept it, it is not just our language that begins to fray at the edges."

Carlin said he didn't think society was "fixable." Perhaps not. But we should still try. And I have a thought or two on where we could start ...