Do you all need your mouths washed out with soap?

Jane Fonda. Wasn’t she married to a man who owned a television network? Seems like she’d know there are words you don’t say on TV.

But on a visit to the Today Show, Fonda dropped one of the most vile words in the English language. Fonda said the C-word on a fluffy morning news show watched by millions of women who think dodge ball is too violent a playground pastime for their kids. Effortlessly, she said it, and without an apparent second thought. The word rolled right out of her mouth, like it was the primary ingredient in a cookie recipe, or the name of the shop where her hair stylist works.

Feminists of Fonda’s generation have a love-hate relationship with the C-word, and some have declared that it’s liberating to say it. Letting it slip on the Today Show was a verbal malfunction of major proportion, brought on by Fonda’s involvement in a much-acclaimed stage play with the unfortunate name “The Vagina Monologues.” The Reasonable Reporter has never seen the Vagina Monologues, and is unable to say whether the show is as revolting as its name.

In other news of 1960s feminists versus the English language, Hillary Clinton got huffy with MSNBC when one of its reporters suggested the Clintons “pimped out” their daughter, Chelsea, by putting the young woman on the campaign trail. Hillary scolded MSNBC for allowing the P-word to be used in conjunction with her daughter. “I became Chelsea’s mother long before I ran for any office,” she said in a letter.

Hillary’s outrage was, of course, momma-bear posturing, but it says two interesting things. First, that she is quite out of touch with pop culture. “Pimp,” a word once doubly loaded for its sexual and criminal connotations, has been defanged and defined downward through repeated use in other contexts. (That doesn’t mean reporters acting in their professional capacity should use it.)

The second thing it says is how damn smart Condi Rice was to resist Republicans who wanted her to seek the presidency. Some in the party thought she’d make a great candidate. We’ll see your first viable woman, and we’ll raise you a viable black woman with actual foreign policy experience.

But Condi squelched the idea immediately, and the Reasonable Reporter wonders whether she foresaw the endless situations in which momma-bear could have favorably compared herself, because she is a mother, to Condi, who isn’t. Childless women know one thing well. We know that our key deficiency, in the eyes of many parents, is childlessness.

Dr. Rice is a brilliant scholar, Hillary might say. But does she know what it is to sit up at night with a sick child and wonder whether her health insurance will cover the problem? Dr. Rice has built an admirable career, but has she ever had to worry about whether her child is reading at grade level? Ad infinitum.

This disqualifying technique would rock the Richter scale with Hillary’s target demographic. It would be pulled out at every opportunity, and would come without the kind of blowback that resulted from the Martin Luther King- couldn’t-do-it-without-LBJ potshot.

Finally, Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin said on a radio show that John Edwards thinks Obama is “kind of a pussy.” For crying all night, people, do you all need your mouths washed out with soap? The Reasonable Reporter is a First Amendment absolutist, and, by the way, has more than a passing acquaintance with profanity. But not on the air. People who appear on news programs – reporters, hosts and guests – have a responsibility to exercise some judgment when they choose their words.

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