The Vilest Thing You Can Say On American Television

Last week, Jamie Dornan was on the Ellen show. They showed pictures of him, maybe at home in Ireland? He was in shorts and went into the water of the ocean. They said this was around Christmas. So presumably the water was very cold. But they didn’t say how cold. In fact they danced around saying precisely how cold the water was. I thought that was odd.

Then yesterday, Halle Berry was on the Ellen show. She was talking about her kid and how they had just discovered the F word (at least I believe it was the F word – it got bleeped). She had been advised not to punish her child as that would make the child resentful and make them want to say the F word even more. So now her kid says the F word all the time. They try not to react so that the kid will soon stop saying it because of a lack of reaction.

Ellen, ever the comedian, started saying the F word every other word, trying for a reaction. Halle Berry joined in and the reactions of the person putting in the bleeps was tested. Fortunately for the Ellen show, it is not a live show. Every F word got bleeped and they were not fined by the FCC. Obviously Ellen wants to go out classy in her last season.

Before these two appearances, I thought the vilest thing you could say on American television was the F word. And close behind that would be all the other swear words that the FCC objects to, too. But now I’m not so sure because of the earlier Jamie Dornan interview. I think there is a whole new category of words that the American public thinks is worse than the swear words, so much so that they are never said.

I believe Jamie Dornan wanted to say that the ocean temperature was near zero degrees Celsius. But he was in America, one of the last bastions of the Imperial system of measurements. So he was afraid to use metric units at all and in fact never actually said how cold the water was.

Ellen, knowing how badly metric would go down with the American public, abetted Jamie Dornan in his reserve. Truly, the vilest thing you can say on American television is metric units. Your degrees Celsius, meters, kilometers per hour, liters, Pascals etc. A big thank you to the Ellen show for making this abundantly clear.