Justices of the Supreme Court will hear arguments on Tuesday to mull a 30-year-old indecency law in a bid by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to overturn a case it lost to News Corp.’s Fox Television.

The arguments will be presented in court on Tuesday, which is also Election Day. However, the justices will talk about the F-word, the S-word and other similar idioms and their many variants. The case could determine whether we’ll hear these words more often or less on TV.

The U.S. broadcasters are battling FCC’s fines for airing banned words, some of them inadvertently. One of the best examples is Cher’s acceptance speech of Billboard Music Award in 2002, when the diva used an expletive to underline her point.

Several broadcasters such as Fox and NBC said the FCC has interfered with their free-speech rights causing self-censorship. The FCC fines discourage broadcasters to air live entertainment and sports broadcasts, Fox attorney Carter Phillips said.

The stakes of Tuesday’s case are very high. Broadcasters, viewers and parents are all directly interested in the outcome of the case and the aftereffects. On the table is laying the future indecency standard for television and radio.

"They [broadcasters] are using the public airwaves for free. We don't think we should have to tolerate a race to the bottom to see who can go further," said Timothy Winter, president of the Parents Television Council in Los Angeles.

FCC will try to convince the Supreme Court justices that the agency had the right to shift its indecency policy. The agency’s regulators need to take the context of the situation into consideration in order to determine whether a fleeting expletive violates the indecency standard.