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JACQUELINE MALEY

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THE LAST TABOO: Should women reclaim the C-word?

Inga Muscio would like to live in a world where the words, "Wow, that is so c...y!" constitute a genuine and heartfelt expression of approval.

She is waiting for the day when the sentence "You are such a c..." is one anyone would be overjoyed to hear, a day when the most offensive word in the English language, the most abused of words, the word largely censored out of television and print and shunned by polite society, has been rehabilitated and embraced.

But Muscio, a 45-year-old feminist and author from Seattle (who, admittedly, has a vested interest, having authored a book called C...: A Declaration of Independence) allows that day probably isn't coming any time soon.

Muscio believes the word, a mere four letters but so powerful (as she says, "There is something about it ... it's just so base; it's like, it means business, you know?") is a metaphor for the status of women. While they are oppressed, the word will be oppressed, too.

But as much as Muscio wants to reclaim, reshape and empower women to use "c...", much in the way the gay community has adopted "queer" and African-Americans have taken back "nigger", even she says that she sometimes uses the word for ill.

"Once in a while, when someone makes me really, really angry, I will call them that," she admits. "I am not immune. It feels good sometimes."

It is as though the word - coyly known as the C-word, the C-bomb, the Anglo-Saxon swear word, tnuc or C U Next Tuesday - has a life of its own. Unlike other words in our lexicon, which we marshal and deploy to suit us, ''c...'' seems to exist outside and beyond us, with a mysterious and plosive power belonging only to it.

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The incredible explosive word