It’s the word that made her slap one of her editors and created a huge media storm:

“I sort of slapped him around,” Couric admits to the magazine. “I got mad at him and said, ‘You can’t do this to me. You have to tell me when you’re going to use a word like that.’ I was aggravated, there’s no question about that.’ But she says she has a good relationship with Cipriano. ‘We did ban the word sputum from all future broadcasts. It became kind of a joke.”