After a speech we gave a few weeks ago, feminist scholar Gina Barreca and I were asked by an audience member if there was any subject too hot to handle in our columns about men and women. We considered this, and confidently declared there was not.

Proving conclusively that there is a God, and that He has a really wicked sense of humor, within a matter of days, something happened to test us. You may not have heard about it; most news organizations chose to ignore it by exercising a quality I like to call "sanity."

Here's what happened: Under the headline "You C_nt Say That (Or Can You?)," the Chicago Tribune printed an article about a word that is widely considered the single crudest vulgarity in the English language -- a word that deeply and grievously offends women. The story actually made the case that this word was slowly ceasing to be taboo, an assertion that was proved instantly false, in as spectacular a fashion as possible: The moment the Tribune's top editors learned about the existence of the article -- in a preprinted women's section -- they ordered armies of editors to descend on the printing plant and blacken their hands by physically removing hundreds of thousands of the offending sections from the newspaper.

Now, the last thing I want to do is make a big, immature deal over the use of profanity, or to make fun of the misfortunes of my professional colleagues -- even silly, doody-brained ones like those at the Tribune. But there was something about this issue that seemed ripe for discussion by Gina and me, and not just because we knew it would make people snort cereal milk out of their noses at breakfast.

As it happens, this story raises intriguing issues about language and gender and censorship and whatnot. Gina and I very much wanted to write about it. So we searched deep within ourselves and decided that, in the interests of free speech and in the furtherance of the loftiest principles of American journalism, we darned well would write about it! The only small remaining question was whether we could get The Washington Post to publish what we wrote.

Gina: Of course we can. The Washington Post is a very sophisticated newspaper. And this story is about synecdoche and metonymy, which are extremely sophisticated literary terms.

Gene: It is? They are?

Gina: Yes. Synecdoche and metonymy are figures of speech that substitute for the name of a person or thing some particular aspect or function with which that person or thing is associated. For example, calling a laborer a "hand," or calling a car a "ride," or referring to a woman as a graphic slang word for a certain part of her anatomy.

Gene: Lady, you are good.

Gina: I am an academic. This is what we do.

Gene: Now, I, personally, do not approve of this word and, just for the record, would happily subject anyone who uses it to medieval-type punishments, including "the wheel," "the rack," "the iron maiden," "the Judas cradle," "Satan's colonoscope" and "Mr. Spanky." But, alas, we are social scientists here and must address this matter fearlessly. Therefore, henceforth in this column, we shall substitute for the offending, unthinkable, un-discussable word, the word "Tribune."

Gina: Okay. Well, I think the article should have been published.

Gene: You do?

Gina: Yes. It's not as though "Tribune" was scrawled on the wall of a bathroom stall. I applaud a serious discussion of the semiotics of the word, or its iconic power.

Gene: Would that be because, in the end, any discussion of the origins and usage of "Tribune" would inevitably lead to the conclusion that men are swine?

Gina: Yes.

Gene: Noted. But why are women so sensitive about "Tribune"? Why does the mere utterance of this word require the use of swooning couches -- whereas when Jon Stewart verbally assaulted Tucker Carlson, on network TV, with an analogous metonymic word to describe a man, there was no public penance? CNN execs did not order the "Crossfire" sets destroyed.

Gina: There is a very good answer to this, but we seem to be running out of space.

Gene: But we haven't explained anything substantive yet!

Gina: We've done better, actually. To paraphrase literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, we have consecrated an intellectual freedom, permitting us to examine the feral word "Tribune" from a combination of perspectives and to offer a rapprochement of sorts: a liberation of the word from small-minded conventions that degrade the species. The process by which we have done this has a name within the academy.

Gene: What is it?

Gina: Humor.