"The whole pleasure of saying it is in breaking the rules," says Nunberg, a commentator on the NPR program Fresh Air who is working on a book about a seven-letter word that can't be written in a daily newspaper.
"The prudes and the libertines need each other. They feed off each other. If nobody cared, there'd be no point to it. It's like when you're 9 years old and you first start learning these words. That's what's attractive about them. It's because they're naughty."
Not everyone has been charmed by the profane ditty. Dan Gainor, vice president of the conservative Media Research Center's Culture and Media Institute, said: "The entertainment world has so little creativity that Cee Lo Green gets nominated because he teaches children how to sing four-letter words. They could vote based on talent, but that's a six-letter word, which is clearly beyond them."
When the Grammy nominations were announced in December, National Review columnist Dennis Prager wrote in the conservative journal that the song "has little, if any, redeeming moral, social, or artistic . . . value. The lyrics are as vapid as they are obscene."
Grant Barrett, a lexicographer and slang specialist who cohosts the public-radio show A Way With Words, says Green's song is not an example of how broadcast standards are eroding.
On the contrary, it's a sign that they still exist. The song uses not only the F-word but also the N-word and the S-word.
"Cee-Lo's song was played with the S-word, the N-word, and the F-word altered," said Barrett. "So the actual words themselves weren't used. Same for the title of the song when used in news outlets, regardless of the medium. Change that, and then we have mainstream acceptance. Euphemized uses don't count as acceptance."
The tradition of altering song lyrics for radio play gathered steam in the 1980s, thanks to Tipper Gore's monitoring efforts with the Parents Music Resource Center. And the Federal Communications Commission began enforcing violations with hefty fines after Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2004, says Kannon, drive-time DJ and program director for Philadelphia hip-hop station Wired (96.5 FM).
