Or "course" language is the kind of language that's really on its way somewhere. Nice catch John.

Thanks for the entertaining article. As Carlin might have observed, "course" language must be instructional.

In the early 70's I ran the front desk of an animal hospital in West Hollywood. A guy came in one day and asked if he could sit around the lobby and talk to people about their pets. It was George Carlin. I had no idea who he was or why he was there. He returned several days in a row and would discuss the love of poodles with curler-clad housewives and blue-haired retirees. To this day I regret not taking more time to get to know the man whose work I would grow to love years later. I'll miss you George.

Almost every day as I begin my work day, easing into it like a swimmer walking into the ocean, I recall with a smile an early Carlin line "Screw the company, the first 20 minutes belong to me."

I didn't agree with his politics or substance abuse but he could riff on simple words and make me cry from laughing so hard. Some of my favorites were for the airline industry (near miss vs. near HIT, deplane), descriptions (jumbo shrimp) and the concept that we should close the prisons and put all the prisoners in the "flat, square states" (Kansas, Nebraska, etc.) and the differences between baseball and football. He also had a way of poking at personal prejudices ("Did you ever notice there are no Chinese guys named Rusty?") making you realize that you were probably a little more prejudiced than you thought you were.

I saw him in concert over 10 years ago when he was objecting to Desert Storm. The audience went with him to a point but then you could feel the hostility build in the room as he continued. I watched him gauge the audience and then turn on a dime to take them from potentially ugly mob to a building filled with laughter as he discussed the contents of his refrigerator and the family pets.

He had his demons but he could still make you laugh and isn't that a great epitaph?

I came across a 70's-era Carlin cassette of my parents when I was twelve. I had a hard time grasping the full nut but this was my first introduction to Carlin outside of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Over the years whenever I caught a Carlin act, I always marveled at the way he would just riff on words... Just imagine his creative process.

Did he sit down with a dictionary and just start giggling to himself?

Favorite Carlin line: "Why do we drive in a parkway and park in a driveway?"

How many biographies and tributes will go on and on about this man's genius without wondering why his heart failed at 71. An admitted health nut for the last 20 years, Carlin was known for both his drug use and his own discussion of his drug use. Through his fourties I'd guess, the dude was way into cocain (and all other manner of pharmacology) and famouly noted that on his first hosting of Saturday Night Live he was stoned on coke the entire previous week.

How then might we also learn a lesson beyond that of language from a man so smart, so unsatisfied, and so honest.

That a recovering addict can only recover just so much of the damage done to a body so abused for so long? I'd hate to think we won't learn any more from the life and death of George Carlin than he was a funny man. He was both far more and far less over the course of his life, and to simply say he was a comic genius really does short change both the man and the public.

The only concert I ever walked out on - Carlin in Ann Arbor, early '70s. He was drinking and "smoking" on stage - as were several of us, including me - in the seats. Reading "new material" from folded-up pieces of paper he pulled out of his pockets. "Two 4-letter things that come out of your body that begin with 's' and end with 't'. Just stupid. Talking to shock rather than entertain or observe. And it was hard to shock a '70s college crowd.

He said that organized religion has convinced us that there's an old man in the sky watching us. I'm a Catholic, and I don't think that, or know anybody who does. I think he profited from those sorts of red herrings.

I also think that, with Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor - also, maybe, Robert Klein - he invented modern stand-up, which is how many of us express ourselves, whether we know it or not.

Like I told my daughter Sunday, when we were talking about social activism, that Gandhi had three kids: Indira, little Mohandas, and Skip, or "The Skipper". My own father couldn't have accessed that idiom.

And I did appreciate that Carlin's 7 "dirty" words were "dirty": obscene, not profane.

I like that his observational humor ("jumbo shrimp") gave rise to "Seinfeld".

Shelley observed that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

Today, I would say, comedians are. So George Carlin was influential, but unacknowledged for that hit-and-miss influence, probably. In any case, a stand-up guy.