Sometimes it pays to read all the way through the ponderous legal documents churned out by the federal courts. For amusement value, the observations of Judge Terence T. Evans of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit are your best bet.

Last week, Evans took a brief detour in a nine-page opinion to discuss a popular slang word. He pointed out that in the transcript of the drug-and-gun case; a Ms. Hayden claimed that a Mr. Murphy called her a string of unpleasant names that ended with the word "hoe. A `hoe,'' of course, is a tool," Evans wrote. "We think the court reporter, unfamiliar with rap music, misunderstood Hayden.

We have taken the liberty of changing `hoe'' to `ho,'' a staple of rap music vernacular as, for example, when Ludacris raps, `You doin'' ho activities with ho tendencies.''"