In Praise of Profanity

When President Obama signed the affordable health care act in 2009, the Vice President was overheard to utter an enthusiastic "This is a big f****** deal!" A town in Massachusetts levies $20 fines on swearing in public. Nothing is as paradoxical as our attitude toward swearing and "bad language": how can we judge profanity so harshly in principle, yet use it so frequently in practice? Though profa...