the.com/lewdness
The legal system's word for 'I know it when I see it, and I saw it.'
means Lewdness is indecent or sexually offensive behavior or expression, especially as judged by community standards of decency.
from From 'lewd,' which in Old English (læwede) originally just meant 'lay' or 'unlearned' — someone who wasn't clergy. Over centuries it slid downhill: unlearned came to suggest coarse or common, then ignorant, then morally base, and by the medieval period it had settled into its modern sense of lustful or indecent. A rare case of a word's meaning traveling from 'didn't go to seminary' to 'arrested for public indecency.'
- legal threshold
- vaguer than obscenity, which is already vague
- etymology
- from old english for ignorant, unlearned
- jurisdiction problem
- varies wildly by county, let alone country
- common pairing
- almost always shows up with conduct attached