"Rah! Rah! Boom Dee Ay! You can't tell me what to say!"

Sometimes, life is like an apple. You see it for what it is, you enjoy it, and you move on.

Sometimes, life is like an artichoke. You don't know what it is but you know it contains different layers and textures.

And sometimes, the case of a high school girl getting jammed up over some salty language is a lot more than what it appears to be on the surface.

You know how people in a minor dispute will sometimes say, "Why make a federal case of it?" Here's a situation of a cheerleader blowing off steam on Snapchat turning into a Supreme Court case.

Brandi Levy is 18 now and attending college, but when she was 14 and finishing her freshman year at Mahanoy Area High School in Pennsylvania (near Pittsburgh) she got some bad news: she was going to stay on the junior varsity cheerleading team as a sophomore. 

In the time-honored fashion of 14-year-olds, she blew up, dropping f-bombs all over her world. “F--- school, f--- softball, f--- cheer, f--- everything,” she Snapchatted on a Saturday morning. To illustrate the nature of her ire, she and a friend posed with their middle fingers up, saying, "Love how me and [another student, whom Levy identified by name] get told we need a year of jv before we make varsity but that doesn’t matter to anyone else?” All this, punctuated with an upside-down smiley face.

For those unaware, a snap posted to a Snapchat story disappears within 24 hours, except when someone screenshots it, giving life to the truth about the internet being forever.

Someone took a screenshot and before you know it, it was in the hands of the daughter of one of the cheerleading coaches. Other cheerleaders said "Gimme an "F!" and complained, and the coaches suspended Brandi from the squad for a year.

The coaches says she had agreed to certain team rules (including showing respect, avoiding “foul language and inappropriate gestures,” and a strict policy against “any negative information regarding cheerleading, cheerleaders, or coaches placed on the Internet.”) and broke said rules.

Larry and Betty Lou Levy, Brandi’s parents, launched appeals with the athletic director, the principal, the superintendent and the school board, and rang up a "NO SALE" at every turn. So, they got with the ACLU and filed a federal suit.

Justin Driver, a Yale law professor and author of “The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind," says, “This is the most momentous case in more than five decades involving student speech.” 

And here's why: 

Previous cases that involve a student's right to free speech concerned speech on school grounds. Notably, in 1969, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District that "students and teachers do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

In other words, it was ok that I replied "The hell should I know?" when asked for an exegesis of Edgar A. Poe's "The Bells" in junior English, but the teacher didn't know it yet.

Professor Driver says, “Much of the speech from students is off-campus and increasingly online. When I talk to school administrators, they consistently tell me that off-campus speech bedevils them, and the lower courts desperately need some guidance in this area.”

In their side of the fight, the Mahanoy Area School District said, "Wherever student speech originates, schools should be able to treat students alike when their speech is directed at the school and imposes the same disruptive harms on the school environment.”

“This may seem like a very narrow case about a minor temper tantrum on Snapchat, but it is about speech anywhere and everywhere, by students of all ages,” said Frank LoMonte, director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida.

And these standards as delineated in this verdict will set the standards for off-school free speech for generations.

It almost makes me want to go back to high school!