I never understood how the widely used word for the act of sex ever got to be thought of as the dirtiest, most hateful word in the English language, anyway. The other night I saw The Sopranos for the first time. It was interesting to watch, well acted, well directed. Better than Traffic, I thought, but like Traffic, gratuitously dirty. It didn't need 90 dirty words in 50 minutes.
Civilization is a bootstrap operation.
We have to make a point of being civilized. Our best behavior doesn't always come naturally to us so we have imposed restrictions. Dirty words in a movie make everyone in the audience less civil by reducing them to what they're forced to think by what they hear together. I saw Erin Brockovich . Now, Julia Roberts uses the F word, too, but I thought it was artistically justified.