“Now everyone is walking around wondering what they can say and censoring themselves and, as a result, lowering the standards of discussion and thought.” Sounds like 2022, but the guy who said this was arrested 50 years ago this week on a charge of “disorderly conduct, profanity.” We’ve come a long way but seem to be looping back.

Comedian George Carlin was performing at Summerfest in Milwaukee on July 21, 1972, doing his then-current routine noting the absurdity that “there are more ways to describe dirty words than there are dirty words: dirty, bad, filthy, foul, vile, vulgar, off-color, blue, naughty, bawdy, saucy, raunchy, street language, gutter talk, locker-room talk, barracks language, indecent, in poor taste, suggestive, cursing, cussing, swearing, profanity, obscenity, and all I could think of were . . .” He then listed what will forever be known as the “seven words you can’t say on television.” I won’t repeat them, but I bet many of you can rattle them off from memory.