There are some good articles from around the time the series premiered. Cussing in the era was mostly blasphemy and sounds (as already noted) like cartoonish Yosemite Sam euphemism. We would have found it an idiotic distraction. Milch chose language that would sound the same way to us as “real” cursing did in that day, more or less.
But as Woo and Groot both proved, a huge range of emotion and content can be conveyed with one word…
ETA: “…the cocksuckers.” (Didn’t want to spoil the thread by leaving that out.)
For a minute there I thought that some cocksucking shitstain was going to drop a steamer of a post in this thread without a single motherfucking expletive in it. I’m as happy as big titted whore with a 30 second shooter to see that it did not happen.
Farnum: Some ancient Italian maxim fits our situation, whose particulars escape me.
Wolcott: Is the gist that I’m shit out of luck?
Farnum: Did they speak that way then?
I wouldn’t worry about the sets. If they are smart they will real time - time jump to a decade later. I can imagine the town would have changed significantly over that time.