That aroused Justice White, who, in a dissent joined by Justices Marshall, Blackmun and Stevens, thundered: "No one can doubt, however, that those same 60,000 Hoosiers would be perfectly free to drive to their respective homes all across Indiana and, once there, to parade around, cavort and revel in the nude for hours in front of relatives and friends. It is difficult to see why the State's interest in morality is any less in that situation, especially if, as Justice Scalia seems to suggest, nudity is inherently evil."

Let me step in at this point, as one who infrequently cavorts nude in front of relatives and friends but who looks forward to his next thrilling visit to the Hoosierdome. Although the Court's opinion twice included Indiana's no-holds-barred definition of nudity (which can be delicately summarized in family newspapers as "it ain't the teat, it's the tumidity"), nowhere in this landmark decision can the concerned public find the meanings and origins of pastie and G-string . It is as if the justices hastily assumed we all knew what these terms signify, or were determined to participate in an etymological cover-up.

Pastie . In John Ayto's Dictionary of Word Origins, to be published in September by Arcade, the root of paste is traced to the Greek verb passein , "to sprinkle"; the noun originally meant a barley porridge. Late Latin borrowed it as pasta and Old French as the basis of pastry ; both words are with us today and excite no outrage except among dieters. Sometimes pasta sticks together, leading to paste in the sense of a whitish flour-and-water mixture with the character of glue, which led to the adjective pasty-faced and brings us to the noun pasties .

Pasties are coverings for the nipples of a stripteaser's (or erotic dancer's) breasts and are affixed by paste, glue, stickum or other mild adhesive. They usually glitter as if dusted by reflecting particles, recalling the earliest Greek meaning, "to sprinkle." The first Oxford citation is from The Washington Post in 1961: "Miss Mason was lying on the floor with nothing on except the scantiest of brassieres, known in the trade as ' pasties .' " However, Fred Mish at Merriam-Webster has just come up with an earlier citation: Earl J. Abbot wrote in True Police Cases in 1954, " 'Pasties' -- adhesive coverings for breast points -- sell at $1.50 a pair and up." (Mr. Mish adds, " Breast points ?")

Got that, brother Souter? Now, brother Rehnquist, to G-string . This is not derived from (as they say at the Court, "bottomed on") the first string on a double bass, the third on the viola or the fourth on the violin. That musical term was first used in print in 1831, without a hyphen, in a review of a performance by the violin virtuoso Niccolo Paganini, extolling the "surpassing beauty of . . . his performance on the single string (the fourth, or G string)."