Family Guy has been censored for using their own curse word that they invented. The show has been on for 21 years now and one word from the fourth season has come back to haunt them. While censors have gotten a little bit more relaxed over the years when it comes to network TV, there are still some pretty peculiar decisions being made today. During the fourth season of Fox’s Family Guy, they were told they could not use the word, “vagina.”
In an effort to get around using vagina, long-time Family Guy writer Chris Sheridan decided that they should just come up with their own word. At the time, they chose “clemen” and it worked as a humorous commentary on censorship, while also being juvenile at the same time. However, now that the word has been around for a while, people know about it, as it was popularized by Urban Dictionary. Sheridan had this to say.
“[Family Guy] has been on long enough that we did a bit once where we had the word ‘vagina’ in an episode. They said, ‘You can’t say vagina on the air.’ So we changed the word and we just came up with our own word and called it ‘clemen.’ We just swapped out ‘vagina’ with ‘clemen,’ and it was like, ‘Oh, we’ll just say that. No problem.’
And then several years later, we did a joke, and we use the word ‘clemen,’ and they’re like, ‘Well you can’t say that.’ And we’re like, ‘What do you mean we can’t say it?’ ‘Well no, it means vagina.’ I was like, ‘I know! We made it up.’ But it made its way into the Urban Dictionary, and then we couldn’t say it. I was like, ‘I think that’s completely unfair.’ So when a show is on that long, it’s just insane.”
Once a word shows up on Urban Dictionary, it’s pretty much everywhere. One can easily go to the site and see that it was first cataloged on 2006 by Rhett Bojangles. He includes the definition: “The hot new curse word that’s sweeping the nation: Clemen,” along with some hashtags calling it a fake curse word. With that being said, there have been quite a few updates to Urban Dictionary in the years since, which might be why the word has been censored from Family Guy.
It should be noted that the number one definition of “clemen” is directly credited to Family Guy on Urban Dictionary. The rest of them are incredibly NSFW and then there are a few more that reference the long-running animated TV series. Making matters even weirder is the fact that Family Guy seems to have gotten away with a lot worse things over the years than an invented curse word. Maybe they can bring the word back when Seth McMacFarlane gets around to making the Family Guy movie.
It’s hard to believe that Family Guy has been on for so long now. When the show first premiered, there were a lot of people comparing it to The Simpsons, which still happens today, but to a lesser extent. When it first debuted in January 1999, there probably wasn’t anyone around thinking we’d still be talking about the series 21 years later or its made up curse word. But, here we are. The interview with Chris Sheridan was originally conducted by CinemaBlend.
