The greatest crime is not profanity per se (see Christian Bale below) but it is the unimaginative use of any word.
I much prefer profanity than the intention degradation that occurs in franchising in terms such as “sharing”, “family” and “owning a business”. Orwell said that degrading language is the only way to make totalitarianism permanent and unshakable.
Northrop Frye on profanity:
Obscenity in language is an ornament except when it becomes routine, & in the latter event it approaches mere idiocy. The most horrid example of passivity & inertia of mind I know is Woodside’s story of the soldier who gazed into a shell hole at the bottom of which a dead mule was lying, and said: “Well, that fuckin’ fucker’s fucked.”
(What sort of person is it, incidentally, whose feelings would be spared by printing the above as “that ____in’ _____er’s ____ed,” or “that obscene obscenity’s obscenitied”?) (Collected Works, 8, 10)
Posted by Les Stewart 
