The "why" of it all
Mikenostic said:
Anyway, it seems that in this day and age of the frustrating economy and stock market, dropping the F bomb has become the norm.
I would suggest that, generally speaking, morals are a matter of luxury. As far as I can tell, the only reason profane words exist is because people find them profane. What the fuck is wrong with fuck? If it wasn't fuck, it would just be something fucking else, like "peanut" or "Belgium".
Human rights and decency in general seem in some way attached to prosperity. The idea that a person should be free from being raped, which we consider a human right, is a convention of society, not humanity. The point comes home in science fiction; with fifty thousand survivors of the human race, would you force breeding? Undoubtedly there are important births in the dawn of humanity that were neither romantic nor consenting. And decency in general; knock a civilized people down a couple of economic notches and they will fall into difficult patterns. Rapes, assaults, and property crimes will all rise.
So it almost seems inevitable that profane language—as small a consideration as it seems in relation to the big picture—should blossom when luxury is threatened.
Still, though, what does this say about moral propositions? Are they really arbitrary, or does it serve some genuine function that we should be offended at a word? Do we scale back with the decline of luxury because we must, or because we think we can?
The article discusses the phenomenon in a correlative sense, but doesn't offer much of an explanation of why.