New Delhi, July 19 -- The Supreme Court has ruled that abusive language, even the notoriously offensive "f" word reproduced verbatim in the judgment, does not become a criminal offence merely because it is vulgar or offensive, underlining that obscenity under criminal law requires a much higher threshold than profanity exchanged in anger. The judgment, delivered by a bench of justices Sanjay Karol and Vipul M Pancholi on Friday, is among the rare Supreme Court decisions to reproduce the commonly used English expletive in full while analysing whether abusive language exchanged during a quarrel amounted to criminal obscenity. The bench held that vulgarity and obscenity are distinct concepts in law as it examined whether its use during a heate...