Adam Liptak has an interesting article in the New York Times today, looking at the use of “[t]he most versatile of the classic Anglo-Saxon swear words” before and by the Supreme Court of the United States. That Court, it turns out is rather prudish: after its decision in Cohen v. California, in 1971, holding that the slogan “fuck the draft” on a t-shirt was protected by the First Amendment, “the word,” which Mr. Liptak never names, “was used in nine Supreme Court decisions, typically in quotations of something a criminal had said. Its last appearance was in 1993.”
I was intrigued and decided to investigate how things stood in Canada. Well, our Supreme Court is less inhibited, or less tasteful, than its American counterpart. Although it did not get in the game until a year later, (quoting a poem, of dubious literary merit, in which a member of a biker gang let it be known that his and his colleagues’ occupation was to “fuck the world”) the words “fuck,” “fucking,” or “fucked” appear in 29 of its decisions, with no sign of a slowdown. However, unlike in Cohen, nothing much seems to turn on “the word” in any of these decisions; they all belong to the “quoting-shit-criminals-say” variety.
Because, unlike Mr. Liptak, I’m not getting paid for looking for dirty words in judicial decisions, I am unable, for now at least, to push my inquiry any further. But for those interested in the subject, there is an article by Christopher M. Fairman, whom Mr. Liptak describes as the “leading authority on the legal status of the word” in the United States, pithily entitled “Fuck”.
UPDATE: When I publish a post, WordPress volunteers some tags which its algorithms think might be relevant to it. The first one that came up for this post was “occupy Wall Street”. Looks like the movement has a foul-mouthed reputation.
Double Aspect 