The Oxford English Dictionary’s three core entries on the word — noun, verb and interjection — are about six times as long as this article. That doesn’t count about 30 derivations and compounds, all colorful and many recent. The nimble word, the dictionary tells us, can help express that a person is incompetent; that another is not be meddled with; that a situation has been botched; that one does not have the slightest clue; and, in a recent addition, that someone has enough money to be able to quit an unpleasant job.
You know the word I mean.
A central question in the case of Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations, to be argued Tuesday, is whether every permutation of the word evokes sex and thus runs afoul of indecency regulations, which prohibit the broadcasting of material that “depicts or describes sexual or excretory activities or organs.”
“Given its core meaning,” the commission told the court, “any use of the word has a sexual connotation even if the word is not used literally.”
Thus, when the pop star Bono emphasized his glee at receiving a Golden Globe award in 2003 by saying his victory was “really, really” — insert a form of the word here — “brilliant,” the commission contended there was a sexual element. So too when Cher, on another awards show, used the word to propose something that ought to be done to her critics.
And there was sex in the air, the commission said, when Nicole Richie, at a third awards show, veered from these scripted comments: “Have you ever tried to get cow manure out of a Prada purse? It’s not so freaking simple.” Ms. Richie did not say “manure,” and she did not say “freaking.”
Bono, Cher and Ms. Richie all made sexual references, and all were indecent, the commission says. “It hardly seems debatable,” the commission wrote in 2006, “that the word’s power to ‘intensify’ and offend derives from its implicit sexual meaning” as “one of the most vulgar, graphic and explicit words for sexual activity in the English language.”
The federal appeals court in New York disagreed. “As the general public well knows,” Judge Rosemary S. Pooler wrote for the majority last year, four-letter words “are often used in everyday conversation without any ‘sexual or excretory’ meaning.”
Bono’s exclamation, Judge Pooler added, is “a prime example of a nonliteral use” that has “no sexual connotation.” In support of that proposition, she cited remarks from President Bush (about the need to get Hezbollah to stop doing, uh, stuff) and Vice President Dick Cheney (urging Senator Patrick Leahy to start doing something not biologically possible).
A dissenting judge, Pierre N. Leval, agreed that many people who use the most adaptable curse word do not intend to refer to sex. (He gave examples: “a student who gets a disappointing grade on a test, a cook who burns the roast, or a driver who returns to his parked car to find a parking ticket on the windshield.”) But, whatever the speaker’s intentions, Judge Leval added, “a substantial part of the community, and of the television audience, will understand the word as freighted with an offensive sexual connotation.”
The commission, on the other hand, has not been entirely consistent. Swearing in “Saving Private Ryan,” the Steven Spielberg war movie? Not indecent. Swearing by blues masters and others in a music documentary produced by Martin Scorsese? Indecent.
Swearing on the “The Early Show” on CBS? Not indecent, because the bad word was part of “a bona fide news interview” protected by the First Amendment. The foul-mouthed subject of said bona fide news interview? A contestant on “Survivor: Vanuatu.”
Thirty years ago, the Supreme Court allowed the commission to censor George Carlin’s famous “seven dirty words” monologue. It justified the decision by saying that broadcasting was “uniquely pervasive” and “uniquely accessible to children.”
Peter Chernin, the president of News Corporation, which owns Fox, said much had changed since the decision in the Carlin case, F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation. That decision, he said, is an artifact of a world without the Internet or cable television programming, neither of which is subject to government indecency regulation.
“The government is turning a blind eye to 99 percent of the content that’s being delivered,” Mr. Chernin said. Viewers who subscribe to cable switch between regulatory regimes by changing channels, he said, leaving broadcasters at “an inexplicable competitive disadvantage.”
Even in the Pacifica case, the court moved cautiously. It emphasized Mr. Carlin’s “repetitive, deliberate use” of swear words and left open the question of whether “an occasional expletive” would be considered indecent.
In other settings, the court has protected vulgarity. In 1971, for instance, the court ruled that it was not obscene to say about the Vietnam draft what Cher said about her critics. “Such expression must be, in some significant way, erotic” before it crosses the line into obscenity, Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote for the majority in Cohen v. California. “It cannot plausibly be maintained that this vulgar allusion to the Selective Service System would conjure up such psychic stimulation.”
Judicial opinions about salty language, like sermons about sin, are the work of amateurs. Jesse Sheidlower, the editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, is a professional.
“I spent much of last year revising the O.E.D.’s entry on it,” Mr. Sheidlower said of the word in an interview the other day. Mr. Sheidlower is also preparing a third edition of his book on the subject, “The F-Word.” (That euphemism, according to the dictionary, first appeared in 1973, in this newspaper.)
The power of the word to shock is in decline, Mr. Sheidlower said, largely because its core meaning has been blurred. The word, he said, “has been around since the late 15th century, and almost all of the nonsexual uses are quite recent, say, late Victorian or later.”
The word has seldom been, in any event, the most offensive one around. Words suggesting questionable parentage — “bastard,” “whoreson” — were long thought more offensive. Blasphemous words have also gotten people into more trouble. These days, a racial slur can end a career.
Mr. Sheidlower said he had followed the court case and did not find it difficult.
“The outrage that the F.C.C. pretends to feel is false,” he said.
“I’m highly opposed to censorship in any form,” he added. “This is censorship. Having said that, I don’t encourage this word to be very commonly broadcast at all times whenever anyone feels like it.”
On Friday, the Supreme Court turned down a request from C-Span for prompt
access to an audiotape of Tuesday’s argument. The court, which occasionally
grants such access, gave no reasons. But Fox’s lead lawyer has said that he
will not be relying on euphemisms.