A reputedly racist insult of high-profile English professional footballer John Terry aimed at another player, Anton Ferdinand, during a televised match in October 2011, containing the noun phrase ‘fucking black cunt’, was first judged by a Chief Magistrate not to be a racist offense, though Terry was afterwords convicted for racially offending Ferdinand. It is argued that this event, played upon in legal rulings, social media and print and broadcast media, makes up an intricate net of linguistic structures and discourse strategies, and is well positioned to be explored with a wide set of tools from pragmatics, discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics.