Must It Always Be About Sex?

The Supreme Court specializes in law, not lexicography. But it will soon have to consider the meaning of that most versatile of four-letter words. 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." "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."