Steven Pinker has an interesting take on swearing here:

In 2007, after a federal court invalidated the FCC's policy as "arbitrary" and "capricious," the commission appealed to the Supreme Court. That's when I got dragged in. The FCC claimed that "even when the speaker does not intend a sexual meaning, a substantial part of the community ... will understand the word as freighted with an offensive sexual connotation." A brief filed earlier this year by the solicitor general in defense of the commission's position quoted from my book The Stuff of Thought as follows: "If you're an English speaker, you can't hear [words such as the F-Word] without calling to mind what they mean to an implicit community of speakers, including the emotions that cling to them." In fact, the words elided in the brief were "nigger or cunt or fucking," and the context was an explanation of why people are offended "when an outsider refers to an African American as a nigger, or a woman as a cunt, or a Jewish person as a fucking Jew." I was certainly not arguing that when listeners hear "It's not so fucking simple," their minds turn to thoughts of copulation!

On the contrary, I noted that over time, taboo words relinquish their literal meanings and retain only a coloring of emotion, and then just an ability to arouse attention. This progression explains why many speakers are unaware that sucker, sucks, bites, and blows originally referred to fellatio, or that a jerk was a masturbator. It explains why Close the fucking door, What the fuck?, Holy Fuck!, and Fuck you! violate all rules of English syntax and semantics--they presumably replaced Close the damned door, What in Hell?, Holy Mary!, and Damn you! when religious profanity lost its zing and new words had to be recruited to wake listeners up.

The FCC was right that I think linguistic taboos aren't always a bad thing. Fuck-peppered speech gets tedious, and malicious epithets can express condemnable attitudes. But in a free society, these annoyances are naturally regulated in the marketplace of people's reactions--as Don Imus, Michael Richards, and Ann Coulter recently learned the hard way. It's not clear why swearing on the airwaves should be the government's business.

Comments

[J.S. Peyton]

I read this on my flight from D.C. to California and I thought, "Man I really need to read The Stuff of Thought, which unfortunately I'd left sitting on my coffee table at home. I've heard that the chapter on swearing is the best chapter in the book. After reading this, that's not surprising.