From the San Jose Mercury News
Are we becoming a nation of potty-mouths?
By Karen D'Souza
U.S. Sen. Carl Levin repeatedly quotes the phrase "sh--ty deal" from a Goldman Sachs memo. Rapper Kanye West titles his new album "Good Ass Job." And "son of a bitch" has become a catchphrase on television's popular "Lost."
From Hollywood to Washington, profanity is peppering the lexicon, even in polite company. Not so long ago you couldn't utter the words on TV or print them in newspapers. Today, off-color language has become commonplace, celebrated, even commercialized. Just hours after the news of the scatological shenanigans broke during last week's Senate hearing, T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase went on sale.
Some wordsmiths warn that we are headed toward a future where nothing is bleep-worthy. They worry that changing how we speak may change who we are....
Other experts suggest that these changes in the idiom are a natural evolution, and not a sign of the coarsening of our culture....
"The language has always been in a state of flux and it's always going to hell in a handcart," agrees Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor of linguistics at [the School of Information at] UC Berkeley, who sees the generational chasm, even in his own family. "I am of the generation that thought of 'sucks' and 'dork' as dirty words, but my daughter has no idea. A lot of slang starts with kids because they are naturally more inventive with the language. One class doesn't want to use the same slang as the class before it."...