Obscene Language Research Articles

Sex Differences in Uses and Perceptions of Obscenity

Leonard Bloomfield long ago cited obscenity as a major form of tabu language because its connotations somehow reflect social improprieties.1 Despite the freer flow of obscene language during the past two decades, we often are reminded that it retains its taboo qualities. In the late 1960s, youthful anti-war protestors gained attention and outraged the establishment by flagrantly shouting obscenities in hopes that they would reveal the true obscenity of the times-the Vietnam war. Later public reaction to President Richard Nixon's actions in the Watergate scandal appeared to arouse, for many, less shock than did the discovery that the leader of the country liberally sprinkled his conversations with obscenities (expletive deleted). In 1980, Barry Commoner, the Citizen's Party candidate for President, created a minor uproar with a radio advertisement characterizing the major candidates and their policies as bullshit.2 And recently, the swearing in of Pony Express mail carriers, who were on their way to perform the postal functions in areas hit by mudslides in the California Sierra Nevada Mountains, included an oath not to use profane language.3 The legal system, too, has indicated that the public be protected from exposure to dirty words through the broadcast media. In a case involving a radio monologue on Filthy Words by comedian George Carlin, the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Communications Commission's right to censor the

Obscene words and the law

This paper asks whether the criminal law can have any legitimate concern with obscene language. At most, such a concern could be justified by the need to protect auditors from offense, since it is not plausible to think of exposure to dirty words as harmful or inherently immoral. A distinction is drawn between “bare utterance and instant offense,” on the one hand, and offensive nuisance and harassment, on the other. Only when obscene language is used to harass can it properly be made criminal. Finally, I criticize in some detail judicial reasoning in the case of F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, and conclude that obscene language on the public media is not properly subject to governmental regulation, whether- by criminal law or otherwise. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A9102008 00002

Delinquency and the Pediatrician

CASE OF PAUL S. Upon arrival at the office, you receive a telephone call from Mrs S. Over the weekend her normally "well-behaved" 14-year-old son Paul, together with a group of school friends, were found by the police at a construction site in the process of spray-painting nicknames, slogans, and "obscene language" on a newly built concrete wall. Several bottles of beer, cigarette papers, loose tobacco, and a small quantity of marijuana were found nearby. Although he began to cry when his parents arrived at the police station to arrange his release, Paul has been "uncommunicative and sullen" ever since, refusing even to attend school today. Paul and his parents must appear before the Juvenile Court in two days, and Mrs S. would like you, as Paul's pediatrician for 14 years, to "see what's wrong" with Paul before then. Among the various options that you might initially choose, how would you decide whether or not to: —refer Paul to a teenage drug rehabilitation program, —arrange an adolescent psychiatric consultation for Paul because of his sudden change in behavior, —have Paul come to see you at the office, to be followed by a meeting with his parents, —reassure Mrs S. over the telephone that Paul is a normal healthy teenager, —inform the school guidance counselor of the reason for Paul's absence and request information concerning his school performance and activities.

Delinquency and the Pediatrician

CASE OF PAUL S. Upon arrival at the office, you receive a telephone call from Mrs S. Over the weekend her normally well-behaved 14-year-old son Paul, together with a group of school friends, were found by the police at a construction site in the process of spray-painting nicknames, slogans, and obscene language on a newly built concrete wall. Several bottles of beer, cigarette papers, loose tobacco, and a small quantity of marijuana were found nearby. Although he began to cry when his parents arrived at the police station to arrange his release, Paul has been uncommunicative and sullen ever since, refusing even to attend school today. Paul and his parents must appear before the Juvenile Court in two days, and Mrs S. would like you, as Paul9s pediatrician for 14 years, to what9s wrong with Paul before then. Among the various options that you might initially choose, how would you decide whether or not to: —refer Paul to a teenage drug rehabilitation program, —arrange an adolescent psychiatric consultation for Paul because of his sudden change in behavior, —have Paul come to see you at the office, to be followed by a meeting with his parents, —reassure Mrs S. over the telephone that Paul is a normal healthy teenager, —inform the school guidance counselor of the reason for Paul9s absence and request information concerning his school performance and activities.

How I Came to Henry James

How I Came to Henry James by Leon Edel Sooner or later people ask me: "How did you first come to Henry James?" The only truthful reply I can give is that I came to Henry James through James Joyce. It sounds enigmatic, and thereby hangs my tale. I have to go back to my junior year at McGiIl University, an old university with gray Victorian buildings, in Montreal. I was in that time of life when adolescence begins to shed some of its lively and mercurial trappings, and behind them one finds the first glimmer of maturity. In 1926, when I was eighteeen, I began to come across the name of James Joyce. He appeared to be a fantastic Irishman who had written a book called Ulysses that had promptly been banned because he used four-letter words and had insulted British royalty. The Canadians were and remain royalists of sorts and, along with Britain, they condemned the turbulent book. In the United States it was the obscene language rather than the antiroyalism that brought down the law on it. Young and literary, I was excited by the mystery of this unobtainable work and its curious history. In time, I found a book about it: this was Herbert Gorman's James Joyce: His First Forty Years. Since Ulysses was unavailable, it was useful to have a kind of surrogate volume that quoted publishable portions and made Joyce out to be a hero—a defiant revolutionary of literature against whom the world seemed to conspire. I swallowed this myth and allowed my imagination to be fired by Joyce's central idea, that of reproducing an entire day in Dublin's life. I lived for the time when I could read a book that had made its author immortal simply by its reputation , before it had been generally read. Then, one day that winter, a friend who had heard me expatiate on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners, Joyce's brilliant unbanned works, brought me the news that he had found a copy of Ulysses smuggled into Montreal from Paris. It was owned by some rich man, and my friend had been promised a look at it; and in a short time he was able to borrow it, and let me have it for three days—not an hour more. The sacred volume had acquired an elegant binding. I must say I turned its pages with a sense of disappointment. I was amused by Bloom's matutinal ablutions, I romped through the unpunctuated monologue of Marion Bloom, but I wallowed and got mired in the long passages of parody, the endless headlines in the "cave of the winds" section, and the night-town prolixities, many of them very funny, but the tedium of others bringing on a sense of irritation. I remember my precocious judgment—a book, I told my friend, to be studied rather than read. We didn't have the phrase about a book being a "page-turner" in those days. Ulysses decidedly wasn't a page turner. But I admired its intentions and was dazzled by such sentences (since constantly quoted) as "ineluctuable modality of the visible." I stirred to its music; and I cherished the book's novelty—this, I recognized, was what we meant when we used the words avant-garde. For" Tn the last and lingering trappings of adolescence, I felt myself to be an "avant-guardian." What excited me most was Joyce's attempt to enter into the thoughts of his characters—impossible, I said, but he had at least created an illusion of our monitoring "the stream of consciousness." That phrase was new to me, and it would be some time before I discovered who had first used it. I shared my borrowed copy with my professor who taught modern English fiction, Harold THE HENRY JAMES REVIEW 160 SPRING, 1982 Files, a Harvard man with sharp blue eyes and a low-keyed way of making his class enthusiastic about Middlemarch or Emma. I pledged him to secrecy and rationed my shared time: he had it for six hours. My satisfied curiosity did not diminish my interest. The brief...

Pro-form and metaphor—Pro-form and vocative

In their very interesting, well-argued and persuasive article 'A systematic approach to Russian obscene language' (RL 6/2, 1982, 232-249) F. Dreizin and T. Priestly write (236) that the mat nouns in the left-hand column of Table I (234) can only be used as PRO-nouns "with overt, explicit determinative adjectives". In other words, to use their own examples (omitting stress-marks), if you say (8) Vcera ja videl bljad you can only mean 'I saw a whore yesterday' but if you say (7) Vcera ja videl etu bljad' you can mean either 'I saw this whore yesterday', where bljad' is in its technical, i.e. literal sense, or 'I saw this person yesterday', where bljad is used as a PRO-noun, i.e. where bljad is almost indeed a pronoun, meaning 'human being', with some additional "colouring". This colouring can be of two types. The use of bljad hiere, instead of celoveka, can mean either we are in a for the sake of a better term "low demotic" mode, in which the entire discourse is coloured, that is to say that the use of bljad and other words of the same type simply signals "low demotic"; or the word bljad can mean, whether or not we are in "low demotic", roughly 'person, pejorative'. On p. 241 Dreizin and Priestly state that mat verbs, as PRO-verbs, are semantically void but "not totally void : they inevitably carry the feature of expressivity". From what I have just written it should be clear that a mat word (be it verb or noun) used as a pro-form (to introduce a blanket term covering all words prefixed with PRO-) may be no more than part of a text all of which is expressively marked or it may itself be an expressively marked item. To return to the use of mat nouns as pro-forms, Dreizin and Priestly state that there are exceptions to their rule that the mat nouns can only be used in this way with determinative adjectives. A class of exceptions is provided by mass-nouns: "in some cases, however, when mass-nouns are involved, the rule may be violated. For example, (14) V lagere kormili govnom. They served up shit in the (labour) camp', may (as in English) be understood in the non-technical sense." This is not in fact the case, for in the example govno is not used as a pro-form but is

A Systematic Approach to Russian Obscene Language

This article concerns that field of the Russian language, about which one outstanding linguist once wrote: “Что касается ‘неприличных’ слов, то идея их ‘непечатности’ в силу очень старой культурной традиции столь укоренена в сознании носителей русского языка, что лингвист, пожалуй, и не очень стремится их включать в свое произведение, если он не хочет, чтобы 90% реакций не были обусловлены ровно этим”. With all this in mind, we also had some hesitations concerning not so much “печатность”, but rather the reality of a part of the facts described. Since, however, several educated Russian native speakers confirmed that such or similar texts are indeed imaginable in extreme situations, we have decided to publish this article as appropriate for the scope of our journal (“Russian linguistics in its manifold diversity”), the counterindicating cultural tradition notwithstanding. Honny soit….

Establishing Reading Groups; Or, Selling Your Product on the Open Market

MIANY STUDENTS NOW, viewing education as mainly career preparation and orientation, are taking more science and business courses; thus, the demand from traditional students for liberal arts courses has lessened. For two reasons many of us view this decline in our course enrollments dismay. The first is a result of the same pragmatism that our students exhibit; we are concerned about our jobs and those of our colleagues. But the second is based on our fear that we will no longer have as wide a forum for cultivating in our students an appreciation for literature. Many of us teach English courses because we recognize that understanding and enjoying the aesthetic is essential in the development of the complete person. We are concerned, good cause, that a society managed by those strengths in the knowledges of business and science, and little exposure to the arts and humanities, may lack the moral and ethical vision-the fuller life-that these disciplines offer. So for both economic and aesthetic reasons we are looking for ways to carry literature beyond the confines of the classroom and into other student and adult communities. We want to insure continued reading and perhaps even to prompt the students to enroll in our courses as elective options and to encourage the adults to take continuing education courses or to enroll in a standard college program. have found that one method to achieve both these aesthetic and practical goals is to establish literary reading groups, or book clubs. am aware that many group reading ventures begin enthusiastically but end with a whimper because the members cannot agree on level of difficulty (I can't remember those Russian names!) or subject matter (I don't like books obscene language, or I won't read a book a character who is a homosexual). But in the last five years have initiated three book clubs and all are currently meeting regularly. believe that the success of these groups lies in the fact that they were structured for different, but homogeneous, audiences. My experience indicates that there are at least three reading group

Obscenity: Its frequency and context of usage as compared in males, nonfeminist females, and feminist females

The intention of this study was to determine, by the use of the Semantic Differential, male and female attitudes toward obscene language and the frequency of usage in both groups. In order to accurately assess if the feminist movement has any bearing on these attitudes, a third group of subjects was involved, females who are active members of feminist organizations. The male and female profiles of attitudes toward all three obscene words used in this study (“shit,” “fuck,” and “bastard”) support previous research in that, overall, women were found to react more strongly to obscene language than men.

Fresh Meat/Warm Weather by Joyce Eliason

346 Western American Literature The dialogue rings true and the action starts on page 1. If there is a moral it is that good is better than bad. And they evoke those times past, just as their poet laureate and honorary president, S. Omar Barker, does in writing: We hark in vain on the speeding train For an echo of hoofbeat thunder, And the yellow wheat is a winding sheet For cattle trails plowed under. DALE L. WALKER, University of Texas at El Paso Fresh Meat/Warm Weather. By Joyce Eliason. (New York: Harper and Row, 1974. 145 pages, $6.95.) When this slim novel first appeared in Utah, Ms. Eliason’s home state, it aroused a storm of controversy due to its scorching commentary on Mormonism. The book’s unnamed central character, an apostate Mormon attempting to free herself of religion’s yoke, not only condemns the church for repressing her individuality but also denounces it as an institution: “It’s a business. A con game.” (p. 76.) And because of this denunciation, few regional critics managed to get past that dimension to any real judgment of the novel as literature. Unfortunately, when weighed against any tradi­ tional literary standard, it does not fare too well, as it is but another in the growing list of “fashionable female-recognition” novels which began with Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. And while there may be, as John R. Milton wrote recently, “two or three obscene women who write well,” I must add Ms. Eliason’s name to those he mentions are not among them. Once past the obscene language, the obligatory, explicit sex scenes, and the other current best-seller ingredients, the reader is left with a lingering sense of superficiality in the author’s presentation of her nameless heroine’s conflict. Obviously, she is today’s Every(wo) man, caught between an imposed, invalid self-image and the discovery of her authentic self. Indeed, the reader is informed of that on several occasions through the heroine’s internal monologue. Even more disappointing is the fact that when the point of resolution arrives, it is couched in a time-worn cliché: “I see myself in my mind . . . as a tiny little slimmer of light at the end of a long dark tunnel.” (p. 106.) Lamentably, then, Fresh Meat/ Warm Weather is little more than a contrived “sanction” novel in which regional perspective is exploited to the pursuit of sensational interests and not to the largest ones, as Brewster Ghiselin has maintained it should. And that is unfortunate, for inherent in the Mormon materials Ms. Eliason uses are all the makings of a great novel. Reviews 347 What she chooses to present, whether from lack of talent or lack of concern, is a paper Mormon and a cardboard temple, and only enough for those who are able to believe in cardboard temples (as Vardis Fisher might say). ALAN CROOKS, Seattle, Washington The Manly-Hearted. Woman. By Frederick Manfred. (New York: New American Library, 1977 [paperback reprint]. 204 pages, $1.75.) This paperback reprint of Manfred’s latest “Indian book” makes the novel available for classroom use, and it will be a valuable complement to a course in American Indian literature as well as any other course that examines the literature of the American West. Harking back to the scene of Conquering Horse, The Manly-Hearted Woman is vastly different from the earlier book — brief and story-like where the early book is long, complex, and novelistic — yet Manfred’s themes remain the same: the exploration of human sexuality, the creation of new American myth grounded in the American land and spirit, affirmation of the complexity and validity of Yankton culture. The plot moves with the inexorable flow of Greek tragedy, though the story itself is unequivocally Indian (again unlike Conquering Horse with its tangle of Greek and Hebraic roots. Aside from a distant connection to the most rudimentary Christ-myth, the plot of The Manly-Hearted Woman is indigenous). From the beginning of the story we know that the hero will die, and the only question is what will his relationship to the heroine be? There are few writers who can...

The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy by Jeffrey Henderson

Reviews 91 Caliban’s role and argues for his multifunctional identity as a man symbolizing both the “touchstone of civilization” and the uncivilized creature who still “may be capable of redemption”; he may also be the monstrous reflection of Prospero’s evil. She concludes with two small but conceivable parallels between James’s work and The Tempest: the use of an illusory banquet and the three passions common to magicians. The last two articles are “Sight-Lines in a Conjectural Reconstruc­ tion of an Elizabethan Playhouse” by D. A. Latter and “The Smallest Season: The Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford in 1974” by Peter Thomson. While not specifically on the “ideas” of the age (although unquestionably relevant to Shakespeare the Jacobean theatre owner), Latter’s paper gives a detailed picture of an ideal playhouse based upon the dimensions in the Fortune contract. With skill and accuracy, Latter accounts for the function of the prick-posts which determined the jutty forward for sloping galleries, the size and location of viewing areas from the pit to the upper galleries, the use of corridors for crowd control, the height of acting areas, and the seating of lords and gallants on stage all in light of the requirements imposed by sight-lines and the financial renumeration sought by the owners. Latter’s is an impressive study which will prompt much response and which goes a long way in answer­ ing some vexatious questions of playhouse structure. Thomson’s paper records and insightfully evaluates performances. Shakespeare Survey 28 is a valuable collection of papers on a broad and complex topic. Of course not all the essays treat the twin parts of the subject equally. Hurstfield admirably covers the ideas of the time but does little with Shakespeare’s plays; Weitz and Berry explore the plays in depth but, regrettably, cite few if any references to the con­ temporary climate of opinion. In fact, Berry searches for the “existential truth” of Hamlet’s tragic situation. But other essays (those by Schoenbaum , Nuttall, Gurr, Kirsch, or Latham, for example) combine the two halves of the topic with grace and insight, joining ideas and the drama which gives them artistic expression. PHILIP C. KOLIN University of Southern Mississippi Jeffrey Henderson. The Maculate Muse; Obscene Language in Attic Comedy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975. Pp. xii + 251. $15.00. In translating Greek obscenities I have regularly used the nearest English equivalent. I hope and trust that no one will be shocked by these words. In any case, the reader will soon perceive that it would be at least cumbersome, and often impossible, to explicate the Greek texts by means of clinical, euphemistic, or Latin terminology. (Introduction, p. xii) With this caution, Jeffrey Henderson introduces his study, in detail and in depth, of Greek comic obscenity. Old Attic Comedy relied upon obscenity as an integral and indispensable ingredient. Yet, as Henderson 92 Comparative Drama states, comic obscenity has consistently been stigmatized as irrelevant, peripheral, or a traditional and unpleasant intrusion imported from Megara or Sicily. Only in reference lists such as that of Taillardat and sporadically in articles or in editions of individual plays has due attention been turned to obscenity, and the absence of any comprehensive inspec­ tion and evaluation of comic obscenity limits the accuracy and value of the judgments which are or can be made. It is Henderson’s purpose to deal synoptically with obscenity in Attic drama, to present and classify the instances of its occurrence, and to draw conclusions as to its nature, purpose, and effect. Initially, Henderson defines the difference in standards applying to obscenity in Greek society and those prevailing in Rome. In the latter, all sexual and excremental activities were considered dirty and tabu. Yet the Greeks recognized the physically natural and normal as acceptable. Good taste and a sense of propriety were the touchstones: aischrologia (abusive language) had its place, but bdeluria (disgusting or repulsive language or behavior) and agroikia (boorishness, speech or action lack­ ing tact or wit) were demeaning and not tolerated. In his discussion of comic obscenity, vis-à-vis pornography, Hender­ son clearly formulates the differentia. Obscenity, extroverted and direct, breaks through tabus to make...

Effects of obscene language upon three dimensions of listener attitude

Male and female university students and non‐students heard audiotapes containing a combination of two antagonistic persuasive speeches on the energy crisis: one with 12 obscene phrases, one with 12 parallel, non‐obscene phrases; one by a male speaker, one by a female; one pro‐environmentalists, one pro‐oil companies. Listener attitude was assessed on three dimensions using the Speech Dialect Attitudinal Scale. Analyses indicated that speakers were rated lower on Socio‐Intellectual Status and Aesthetic Quality when they used obscene language than when they did not; however, no difference was found on Dynamism. Other findings regarding speaker sex, listener group, and listener sex are discussed.

The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy. Jeffrey Henderson

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy. Jeffrey Henderson Hugh Lloyd-JonesHugh Lloyd-Jones Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 71, Number 4Oct., 1976 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/366298 Views: 4Total views on this site Copyright 1976 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy

historical place of Attic obscenity, a typological breakdown of obscene imagery, and an analysis of the dramatic part of obscenity in each play. The major part of the book consists of a philological critique of each word group suspected of obscene overtones. This is numbered, indexed, and divided into sexual organs, sexual congress, scatology and homosexuality. There is a second index of passages discussed and an appendix arguing against the influence of Dorian farce on Attic comedy. This is generally a judicious and well-written book, whose ease of reference and comprehensive coverage of the phenomena of obscenity will cause it to be used and abused for some time to come. Most readers will find that they had underestimated the amount of sexual metaphor in Aristophanes; indeed the author is scarcely to be blamed if his mind has been so steeped in double entendres that, e.g., on 130 he mistranslates Photius' ganglion to produce an erection, or on 147 a bird turns into a pussy. Clearly his Greek is not without faults and should be checked. The strength of the book is, despite lapses, in its gathering and analysis of the philological evidence. Henderson demonstrates that certain words are primally obscene and therefore shocking, others less so and adjustable in a scale upwards to mild euphemism and medical correctness. This observation enables him to make some good dramatic points about the distribution of obscenity between characters in the course of which the recent Oxford commentaries are several times correctly chastized for failing to explicate humour. I found his remarks on the Acharnians particularly well considered. In spite of the freedom of the language which Henderson of necessity employs, he has a peculiar view of modern sexuality which causes him to have an equally unbalanced view of ancient habits. Throughout the book we are accused of massive inhibitions, feelings of disgust, etc., leading to neuroses at the thought, sight, or sound of obscene phenomena. Perhaps this is true in Boston; but it is no longer true of most civilized countries, and neither conversation at a French dinner table nor behaviour at a

The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy

The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy

Evaluation of the speech dialect attitudinal scale

Listener groups employed the Speech Dialect Attitudinal Scale (SDAS) to rate speakers in a variety of situations. These involved: (A) foreign accent, (B) regional dialect, (C) speech pathology, (D) broadcast news reporting, and (E) use of obscene language. Reliability of ratings was consistently high, with a median of .98. Evidence of construct validity was provided by the factor structures of SDAS item scores. Except in the case of the speech pathology experiment, the factor analyses yielded a remarkably consistent three‐factor structure: Socio‐Intellectual Status, Aesthetic Quality, and Dynamism. In each case, analyses of variance and covariance of SDAS scores discriminated among speakers differentiated by linguistic variation, further supporting the validity of SDAS data.

WILSON v. RACHER

February 15, 1974 Master and servant — Wrongful dismissal — Gardener — Contract providing for six months' service and thereafter terminable annually — Obscene language on one occasion by efficient gardener — Provocation by employer — Whether summary dismissal justified.

Obscene Language and Evaluative Response: An Empirical Study

126 Ss' responses to obscene language from the evaluative dimension of meaning were investigated. Results indicated that Ss respond most favorably to religious profanities and that sexual words generally received the most negative evaluative response of those words surveyed.

A Preliminary Investigation of Obscene Language.

Both classical anthropological evidence and recent psychological research suggest the possibility that obscene language is both a linguistic universal and one of man's most frequent types of linguistic expression. The report here is of the initial results of what will be a comprehensive research project concerned with the use, function, and personal-cultural-linguistic significance of obscene language within English and in a variety of other languages. In the present study of a college student sample, an empirically derived set of linguistic obscenities was obtained, the effects of sex and production mode upon the quantity of production were assessed, and the obtained obscenities were categorized with respect to the denotative domains of experience to which they referred. In addition, a questionnaire survey of attitudes toward and use of obscenity was taken among the producing Ss. It was found that while production mode (oral vs. written) did not affect the quantity of obscenity produced, males significantly outproduced females. Furthermore, the obtained obscenities were meaningly classifiable into a rather limited number of categories of social-psychological experience. Those categories containing the most exemplars seemed to reflect certain cultural attitudes toward the domains of experience represented by these categories. Finally, general analyses of questionnaire responses revealed that Ss (a) generally used obscenity freely, although they would limit usage around children and their own parents; (b) indicated restrictive reactions-particularly punishment-on the part of their parents when Ss used obscenity during their upbringing; and (c) gave the reason of emotional release as their primary motivation for using obscene language. Implications of the present research for future investigation-particularly across languages-were discussed.

Obscene, indecent, or profane broadcast language as construed by the federal courts

In these days of the “new morality,”; language that once would have been banned as a matter of routine is now heard on the air. However, the exact limits of what constitutes obscene, indecent or profane language over a radio or television station are somewhat vague. The following article examines the relevant cases that have been adjudicated in the Federal courts in an attempt to define this hazy but perilous line. Mr. Wesolowski recently has accepted a position as assistant professor of English at Western Kentucky University. Previously he taught at Wisconsin State University‐Stevens Point, the University of Wisconsin‐Milwaukee and Villanova University. This research is based on studies originally undertaken while he was a doctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin.