ABSTRACT
There is, as we have seen, a severely competitive aspect to the arithmetics of the f-word, and not merely between the voluble cavaliers for whom the more the merrier (and they’ll carry their righteous case up to the Supreme Court in the name of freedom of expression)...and the thin-lipped puritans who tot up the instances of sin, ruin, vice and corruption (and go on to lobby for censorship). We learn that the latest (and posthumous) television script of the prolific Dennis Potter uses the f-word forty-one times in an hour! But surely this straightforward kind of content analysis, especially if the arithmetic is done by computerized search, tends to a significant margin of error.
