The current headline sensation is the Fucking Plebs story. The interesting thing about the fallout from Andrew Mitchell’s outburst, apart from the fact that the Tories look down on everyone, even the people they pay handsomely to do their dirty work, is the fact that a senior MP got away with swearing at a police officer.
Despite the debatableprovisions of the 1986 Public Order Act, generally speaking it doesn’t take much for an ordinary person to be arrested, for example the Oxford University student taken to court for “remarks likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress”. He asked a mounted officer if he realised his horse was gay.
There is one other thing to mention about swearing. It is intimately connected with class society. Here’s Leon Trotsky on the matter(weighted toward post-revolutionary Russia, but with some general applicability).
Broadly speaking there are four categories of swearing, filth, sex/sexuality, race and blasphemy, translated into social terms they are contempt, oppression and bigotry. The fact that we might feel the need to swear, often without realising what we are doing, indicates how despite our best efforts we still take aspects of the prevailing ideology on board. This also shows the other point about ideology that needs hamming home, the prevailing ideology is such that we do not recognise it for what it is, at least not until we come into conflict with it.
Swearing is something that will wither away with a classless society. We can do our best in the meantime to be aware of its origins and significance to counter its more pernicious effects, racism, sexism and so on.