In a 2022 interview with The New York Times, Alan Alda, who won five of the series’ 14 Primetime Emmys throughout its 11 season run (three for acting, one for directing and another for writing), said that Gelbart bristled when a censor struck at the use of a word that has a sexual connotation but was not being deployed in a sexual manner.
According to Alda:
“The most striking example to me was early in the series. Radar [Gary Burghoff] is explaining to somebody that he’s unfamiliar with something. And he said, ‘I’m a virgin at that, sir.’ With no sexual context. It was just that he’d never done something before. And the CBS censor said: ‘You can’t say the word ‘virgin.’ That’s forbidden.'”
This ticked off Gelbart, which prompted him to mess with the censor. As Alda recalled, “So the next week, Gelbart wrote a little scene that had nothing to do with anything. A patient is being carried through on a stretcher. And I say, ‘Where you from, son?’ And he says, ‘The Virgin Islands, sir.'”
Again, once “M*A*S*H” rocketed into the Nielsen ratings’ top 10 and started winning Emmys, the series got a little more leeway and, for a network sitcom, formally adventurous. And that’s why the show is every bit as watchable today as it was during its initial run.