A couple of years ago, in fact, my wife and I and some friends started our own little annual midsummer's film festival. We borrow the movies and project them on the side of a barn. The breezes blow, everybody sits on bales of hay. You can hear the projector clicking along and shadows of the odd insect zoom across the screen. It's heavenly.

A dozen or so little kids come with their parents, so we program the thing with them in mind. We try to pick films that might keep their interest for a couple of hours. And, of course, we don’t show anything dirty or violent, like Deliverance, or with really rough language. Lots of the films we show are strange -- “adult” in the old-fashioned, non-porno sense….but none of them would be rated R.

I guess that’s the de facto “community standard,” in our little community in upstate New York.

“Community standards” is the phrase lawyers and judges and regulators always throw around in cases involving “indecent” language in entertainment and the media.

Here’s how the Federal Communications Commission defines indecent language: “sexual or excretory activities or organs” “described in terms patently offensive” according to “contemporary community standards.”

The problem facing TV and radio is that to some community somewhere, saying something innocuous is going to be considered patently offensive. That's in the nature of indiscriminate broadcast media.

Consider one contemporary slang phrase: "to suck," meaning "to be inferior." Now once upon a time, in the etymological mists of the 1960s and 70s, I guess this intransitive verb referred to the transitive verb -- that is, to a particular sexual activity.

But it simply doesn't anymore in the current usage. To every American child whom our "community standards" are supposedly protecting, to say that something "sucks" just mean that it's lousy, stupid, crummy, crappy.

Uh-oh: the word “crappy” has its origins in an excretory activity, doesn’t it?

Anyhow, the point is the context. When Bart Simpson talks….

Bart: “TV sucks.”
Homer: “I know you’re upset right now so I’ll pretend you didn’t say that.”

-- we all know he’s not making any kind of sexual reference.

But for the last few years and especially the last few months, the FCC has dramatically raised the fines for indecent speech. And the FCC is also defining indecency more broadly than ever - in other words starting to ignore the context.

And broadcasters are buckling under. On this program a couple of weeks ago, for instance, in a discussion of a series of paintings about California, we aired a light-hearted sound bite of somebody challenging the idea that, quote, “L.A. sucks.” My producers debated whether to cut the quote out altogether - and decided against, but did feel obliged to warn all our stations in advance. Some of whom bleeped it.

And on NPR’s Fresh Air program not long ago, a cautious lawyer recommended that the show’s producers cut the word from a song lyric. The producers didn’t cut the word, they played it backward instead.

As recently as a year ago, at least on this show, this kind of fussing and cutting didn’t happen.

In other words, you can really feel the chilling effect.

Which to me is itself chilling.

Because the serious question we face here as a culture is whether we’re going to let our most easily offended communities dictate the rules of what can or can’t be said over the public airwaves.

Because if it’s the word “sucks” today, what’s it going to be tomorrow?

This is Kurt Andersen.