Frank Spencer\] “Father?” \[/Frank Spencer
(curses in Victorian)
By ———! I’ll be d———d if I take after such b———s! ———!!
Very true. For the past several centuries in western culture, probably since Shakespeare’s time, every decade has been different from the preceding one. We just smoosh them together because it’s too hard to understand them separately.
Read pre-WWII novels, e.g., and the casual use of racial and sexual slurs is startling, and they were uttered by people of all classes. Yet vaudevillian Chic Sale sold a million copies of a monolog called “The Specialist.” What did he specialize in? Building outhouses. Neither that word nor the end product was ever used in his euphemistic avoidance of specifics but the very idea created a popular sensation.
Note that right-wing "intellectuals’ keep insisting that a return to the politeness and formality of past years is necessary to reform our fractured society. That’s also euphemistic. They’re panicking because when society says fuck you to the culture tying to rule from above there’s no return.
I think this is a good point.
I don’t want to go back to the way things were before the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s where you had to dress up for a white collar job, people acted all horrified if they heard someone swear, and women were expected to wear one kind of clothing and men another, because “what will people say?” Yet the same people who enforced these veneers of respectability also had no problem with having condescending attitudes toward people of color, toward women who did not want to limit their existence to working at gendered jobs until they got married and then becoming a stay-at-home mom, and so on and so forth.
Today nothing stops you from dressing up if you want to, but you have much more freedom to choose. It’s none of my business what the next person wears. I like the saying “I was not born to paint your world!”
As for swearing, I think it has a social function, and while one shouldn’t use it indiscriminately, I don’t agree with trying to censor it.
I myself swear a lot, though I swear relatively little in English. But since I learned Czech, living in Prague, I have developed quite a potty mouth. First of all, I learned Czech among poor people with whom I used to live and among working-class people with whom I made friends, not among classy and well-educated people, and this reflects the register of my language. Czech has very creative expletives compared to English, and I use a lot of these. This is in large part because I am actually an angry, frustrated, and neurotic person. At the end of the day, it’s just phonemes, nothing else.
That said, I know to control my language. I won’t use certain words in certain company.
I think the problem with Trump is not merely that he swears (and yes, if I were a politician, I would try to watch my language when speaking in public), but that he has no filter and that he insults people left and right. He has no qualm with calling a woman “piggy” or posting AI-generated videos where he is dropping fecal matter on people opposed to him or one where his predecessor in office and his wife are depicted as dancing apes.
I see no use in addressing people as “Sir / Ma’am”. I don’t agree with demanding that people use “markers of respect” when speaking with others. As long as you are not actively disrespecting someone and as long as you are not doing anything inconsiderate toward a person, your respect should be assumed and they shouldn’t need to be assured of your respect all the time. Just call me by my name or don’t call me anything, and be done with it. I don’t have such a low ego that I need to be addressed through formulas and turns of phrases. I’m glad it’s now common in the Anglosphere (certainly in North America) nowadays to be on a first-name basis more or less from the get-go.
Nitpick: Specifically, the so-called “sack suit” with unshaped coat that supplanted the more formal frock coat or cutaway (now usually seen only at weddings and state ceremonies).
For centuries, a civilian man’s outfit has been called in English a “suit” of some kind, up to and including the massively ornate and embellished “court suit” in silk brocade and whatnot. But you’re right that the typical 20th-c officewear garb that now represents our default idea of a “man’s suit” was originally considered far too informal for the office.
And yet he always wears suit and tie, the uniform of our oppressors.
Honestly, Trump’s willingness to say “fuck” is just about the only thing about him that doesn’t annoy me.
But special occasions are also when we judge each other the most. What I mean is this: yes, people dress up for weddings, for instance, because of tradition and to show respect; but they also do it to show their relatives and their community how important and successful they are. You can’t ignore that aspect of it.
I’m fairly sure I have “software engineers tourettes” in that I swear loudly like a trouper facing a major Java bug, and attempting to fix it.
I know what the N word is and I think I know what the R word is, but I cannot imagine what the F might be (if it is not a variant of the 4 letter word).
The most vulgar person I am aware of always appears in public wearing a suit, white shirt and (too long) tie. I can barely recall the last time I wore a suit. But I don’t think I am coarse.
I believe it refers to a bundle of sticks.
Used as seasoning, profanity works well. But like seasoning, too much ruins the dish. I dropped a anvil on my foot once, the air turned blue (I wasnt badly hurt i had steel toed workshoes and it barely hit, but still).
I knew a couple military buddies who used the F word as a verb, noun, adverb, and adjective- sometimes all in the same sentence. It got boring.
In the first draft of my first novel, I had 500 iterations of the word “fuck.” Not all my characters swear, it’s just that the one that does couldn’t stop to save his life. I had to dial it back considerably but it’s still pretty frequent.
Even “fuck” is losing its teeth. I think it’s partly because WTF and DGAF and FAFO have become part of the modern parlance. They got their foot in the door because they weren’t coming out and saying the word explicitly, but then once they made it into the mainstream everyone seems to have said, “Eh, what the fuck. Might as well say it.”
It’s such a beautiful word though. I mean I genuinely love it. It has so many colorful variations.
In my view the two issues are completely separate and my answer to the OP question is “yes” to the first one and “no” to the second.
Even within the span of my own career, there’s been a drastic change in business dress standards. What used to be mandatory suit and tie quickly became business casual across a wide swath of businesses, including some traditionally very conservative ones. Employees were more comfortable, and nobody suffered, except maybe suit manufacturers. People also tend to dress more casually when they leave the house and often when they travel. I object to people who get on an airplane looking like homeless bums, but within reason, who cares? No harm done.
Language is different. I see that there’s some controversy over whether language has indeed become cruder and more vulgar in modern times, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that it has.
Language is very powerful and is much more than just a means of communication. Language is not only a reflection of who we are as a person and a marker of personality, but it also encodes and shapes our thoughts and behaviours. It’s self-evident that a racist will use racist language, a miogynist misogynistic language, and so on. This is one reason that language is constantly being manipulated by agenda-driven interests.
Someone who persistently uses crude and vulgar language (I don’t mean the occasional profanity, but a persistent pattern of offensive vulgarity) is more likely than others to have a crude and vulgar outlook on life, which may accordingly correlate with how they treat the fellow creatures that share this planet with us all. How we use language is at some level both a marker of who we are and a determiner of what we become.
I say how we dress is the same. Someone who cares not at all for personal appearance is someone of haphazard, lazy, and selfish short-sighted thought patterns.
Back in the day they placed great store by self-discipline and the value of harsh self-imposed measures as indicia of seriousness and reliability. They were not far wrong.
As the audience here is largely older and retired, there’s a certain amount of slack given. What’s an acceptable degree of “IDGAF anymore” in a slowly fading e.g. 75 yo is positively antisocial personality disorder in an e.g. 25yo.
I can see your point to a degree, but I say language is a much, much stronger marker of personality than clothing. Someone who persistently uses vulgar language is probably a crude ass for the reasons I already indicated. Someone who dresses sharply may just be a pompous vain rich kid who kicks puppies. Someone who dresses sloppily clearly doesn’t much care about his appearance, but at worst that might indicate “lazy”, perhaps undisciplined, but I see no reason to correlate it with “selfishness”. That kind of dress often correlates with creative types who are often kind, sometimes poor, and often raise puppies! 
Consider counter-examples. Einstein didn’t care how he looked, but was by all accounts a kind man. Now consider your current president. He doesn’t dress particularly well because he’s a tasteless idiot and doesn’t know how, but Lord knows he tries, and he’s the most vain, cruel, and narcissistic human being I’ve ever encountered. And look at his language. He’s petty and vulgar when he speaks, and barely literate when he writes.
I believe I have just been insulted! 
I think a major reason is because it’s only “offensive” for arbitrary reasons mostly revolving around the deeply embedded prudishness of our society. So once the taboo is breached there’s not much staying power for its “offensiveness”.
As opposed to other offensive words that are either slurs, or refer to things people intrinsically find unpleasant (like all the various words for excrement).
It’s a shame.
I don’t relish trying to explain to my kid what cursing is. He sees right to the heart of stupid, arbitrary shit.
Last night my husband told him that he (my husband) needed to change into more comfortable clothes.
Son: “Why are you even wearing those clothes if you’re not comfortable? You should only wear comfortable clothes.”
Right there with you, kid.
And 60 years later, half those people are old MAGA repubs, who realized no, they don’t actually want those people living equally in their sphere, and that their ideas (gay marriage, equal rights) are dangerous.
As I’ve put it elsewhere, there are always “progressives” who are so until we reach the point to which they wanted to progress, and then want to stop there.