Another one of counterculture's brightest lights winked out on June 22, when comedic genius George Carlin died at the age of 71.

The foul-mouthed but brilliant Carlin is the latest loss in a bad stretch that includes luminaries such as Ken Kesey (2001), Johnny Cash (2003), Richard Pryor and Hunter S. Thompson (2005), and Kurt Vonnegut (2007).

Those six faces should be carved on counterculture's Mount Rushmore - together, they represented some of the best our side had to offer, the strongest part of the argument that we're right and the establishment is wrong.

In the words of Thompson, they were "God's prototypes," and they were Kesey's "warriors of the people," the sublime few the author called "cream rises" when he dubbed so many others "shit floats." Guys like Carlin were indeed one-of-a-kind revolutionaries who pushed the boundaries so hard, they crumbled and let loose a wave of explorers who revelled in the new territory sprawling outside the fenced-in plots of mainstream media.

I always held Carlin in particularly high regard because he was one of the rare wits who could make people laugh and think, a guy who was as clever as he was perverse, a lovable miscreant who took endless pleasure in making conservatives sweat while coaxing ordinary folks to turn on their brains.

Perhaps best known for his bit Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV, Carlin taught me that cursing is an art form, and that a well-placed epithet can turn an ordinary sentence into a razor that cuts a path right across the page and threatens to leave a reader's fingers bloody.

I've always wanted this column to cause laughter and thought in equal proportions, and I'll freely admit that Carlin is the inspiration behind it. Over the years, I've managed to sneak six of the master's seven words into print, and I'm sure I'll get the last one scratched off soon enough as a tribute to the old cocksucker.

And that's what Carlin taught me: words are just words, and we shouldn't be afraid of them, even if they drop into a column or conversation like a 50-pound brick. Being afraid of words leads to being afraid of ideas, and when that happens, society is screwed and it's nothing but Nickelback, Grisham novels and Survivor.

Instead, we should use the most powerful words we have to articulate the most vivid and challenging ideas, and those ideas should be used to make people think, even if doing so is uncomfortable and even frightening. If we laugh our asses off while we're at it, so much the better.

That's how human thought evolves: Someone draws a line, and someone else crosses it and draws another one three feet ahead. Someone else goes a step further, and then someone like Hunter S. Thompson drives over the line at 200 km/h on a Vincent Black Shadow and heads off into the sunset with nothing but a mind full of ideas.

And, if you follow those tracks way out beyond the boundaries of good taste and accepted thought, you'll find a group of free thinkers dancing naked around a fire while thinking the thoughts that will help our generation become something more than a collection of celebrity sex tapes and nipple slips.

As of June 22, the Jolly Roger flag at the campfire is at half-mast, but the fire burns on because guys like Carlin have been stoking the flames for years.

Thanks, George. I'll miss you.

Mike Warkentin can think of more than seven words you can never say.