Jesse Sheidlower’s piece ran in The New York Times on the last day of March, so you knew it couldn’t be an April Fool’s joke. Three years ago the Times Magazine ran a similar one by Jenny Diski, who sought out the Gray Lady as the most appropriate venue for a plea on behalf of greater freedom to use a common vulgarism for the female pudenda. Needless to say, the word did not appear in her article. At least Mr. Sheidlower, the President of the American Dialect Society and, until 2005, the Principal North American Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, was so far emancipated from propriety that the title of his book, The F-Word, could be mentioned in his capsule bio. Ms. Diski had been reduced to inserting in the place of the word she couldn’t use “the word I can’t use” in brackets. It was the Times against the Times and a flagrant violation of the rule in the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (under “Obscenity, Vulgarity, Profanity”) which reads: “Discussion about an expletive does not end with the decision against using it. The Times also forgoes offensive or coy hints. An article should not seem to be saying, ‘Look, I want to use this word, but they won’t let me.’ ”

Now Mr. Sheidlower was returning to the offensive offensive in the pages of the same paper by saying explicitly that he wants to use the word