The good news is that there is public pressure to maintain standards of some sort in public scenes and over the airwaves. On Thursday, the House even passed the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which would fine offenders impressive sums of money. The trouble has to do with the difficulty in defining objectionable, though you feel this in your groin. The Janet Jackson display at the Super Bowl crossed the threshold and awakened some latent sense of decorum. The public sense of it was that to bare a breast as part of the half-time entertainment at the largest annual sports event in the world was an excess. An excess is defined as something the public thinks of as inappropriate and perhaps, even, wrong.

The protests overruled the general public unconcern over semi-nakedness. Although bared breasts are increasingly routine, there is still a consensus against public striptease. The sense of it is, Okay, do this kind of thing and more ? much more ? on the Playboy Channel and in Las Vegas, but draw the line somewhere this side of the Super Bowl. It isn't obvious which authorities to appeal to in the matter of displays at ordinary football games, but inasmuch as this one was carried on television, the Federal Communications Commission was invoked. It has the power, given to it by Congress and reinforced on Thursday, to uphold some standards, even if they are by and large in shreds, that hold out against exhibitionism, obscenity, and blasphemy.

The FCC faces a problem at the level of language. The defendant here is one "Bono," who, when the Golden Globe awards were given out, expressed his pleasure at receiving one by saying, "This is really, really f ? -ing brilliant!" The exclamation point here is my contribution to the defense being pleaded: Mr. Bono's spokesmen tell us that the disputed word was used purely as, well, a verbal exclamation point. And that is entirely plausible. By no means everyone uses the word as a mere intensifier, but many people do, if they are expressing themselves theatrically. You cannot, of course, cross the stage of The Sopranos without using that word as a kind of verbal connective tissue, sometimes positive (as when you get a Golden Globe award), sometimes negative (as when the car behind you honks), sometimes as a kind of hiccup punctuating conventional speech. You can even call up a formulation in which you might use it as genuine anathema: "You have f ? -ed yourself out of the Christian community." But that, said seriously, might be offensive to those who believe that theological exclusions breach the wall of separation of church and state.