I appear to be the first person online to point out that there was an offensive word spoken (or rather sung) in the ABC NEWS feel-good piece on Nikki Yanofsky broadcast on Tuesday, February 9, 2010:

About halfway through the expose on the teenage singer who performed 'O Canada' at the Vancouver Olympics opening ceremony, there is a home video of the Yanofsky family singing 'Old MacDonald Had a Farm', during which performance, a careful listener can clearly hear a young off-screen wiseacre belt out the following obviously ad-libbed line:

Old MacDonald Had a P----

In case you're wondering, the "P" in this case appertains to a certain external sexual organ common to human beings of the male persuasion.

I kid you not. Listen (carefully) for yourself. Again, this offensive audio can be heard about halfway through the 2-minute piece.

When I watched the broadcast last week, I was a little surprised that none of my friends in the room had appeared to notice the jarringly out-of-place lyric, but I soon forgot all about it and got on with my life.

This morning, however, I remembered the broadcast in question, so I figured I'd go online to see the brouhaha that I felt such a gaffe would surely have generated in the blogosphere -- -- only to find, to my astonishment, that no one else online appears to have even noticed the presence of this scandalous terminology in the broadcast, much less created a rhetorical firestorm about it. Bear in mind that the word is clearly audible, even if it is somewhat hidden beneath the strident caterwauling that appears to have qualified as "singing" for the Yanofsky family back in 1996.

Now, before there are any jokes about my perhaps somewhat suspicious-sounding ability to hear the 'P' word where others (at least at first blush) cannot, please understand that I have worked as a television closed-captioner for the last 20 years and so my ability to pick out words in the background of a noisy soundtrack is no doubt somewhat more honed than that of the average home viewer.

Still, it never occurred to me that I was being handed a 'news exclusive' when the piece aired last Tuesday. (No, I wasn't captioning the show at the time, I was watching it, so to speak, as a private citizen.)

Just think of the position I'm in: The fate of ABC NEWS is now in my hands. Since I'm apparently the only viewer who heard the banned word on its original airing, only I can plausibly tell the FCC that I was offended by hearing it, in which case who knows what fines the network news operation might be subject to? (Maybe I can sue for damages, too. I do have a bit of a headache today: Who's to say it wasn't caused by my great shock at hearing this unexpected dirty word on ABC NEWS?)

Mind you, I AM tempted to rat on ABC NEWS, because they just recently ignored a short essay of mine that I wrote in response to another one of their recent feel-good pieces that they broadcast only the night before the feature in question (see 'The Power of Halfwits,' my response to the ABC NEWS feature entitled 'The Power of Half' that was broadcast on February 8, 2010).

But then they're busy people and they no doubt lost track of my importuning e-mails on that head.

Still, if they're smart, they'll stop broadcasting the 'P' word like that because the next time they do so, I may not be the only one who hears it!