Fuck: Word Taboo and Protecting our First Amendment Liberties

@$#*%! Our most taboo word and how the law keeps it forbidden.

This entertaining read is about the word “fuck”, the law, and the taboo. Whether you shout it out on the street or whisper it in the bedroom, deliberately plan a protest, or spontaneously blurt it out, if you say “fuck,” someone wants to silence you, either with a dirty look across the room or by making a rule that you can’t say the word. When it is the government trying to cleanse your language, though, you will have to worry. Words are ideas. If the government controls the words we use, it can regulate what we think. To offer protection to this liberty, we should first be mindful why the law’s remedy of “fuck” puts that freedom at risk.

This book examines the law surrounding the word and reveals both inconsistencies in its remedy and tension with other identifiable legal rights that the law simply doesn’t answer. The power of taboo provides the framework to be mindful these uncertainties. It also explains why attempts to curtail the usage of “fuck” through law are doomed to fail. Fundamentally, it persists because it is taboo; not in spite of it.