With all due respect, you’re missing the point, Ed. Ed, I don’t know if you’ll actually read this, or if you care. I have barely 2,000 posts to my name in many years posting here, and I doubt I’ve made much of an impression on anyone who doesn’t play Mafia or care about baseball. And just to provide a bit of context on my own opinion: I am absolutely certain I’ve never called another user a cunt. My own posts very rarely contain profanity (although they certainly do from time to time), and I’m pretty sure I’ve never started a Pit thread attacking another poster (unless Brett Favre is lurking out there somewhere, in which case, gosh, I’m sorry, Mr. Favre. Please stay retired).
But I want to respond to the above, because I think you’re mis-stating the source of objection to this new policy, or rather, oversimplifying it. It’s easy enough to dismiss complaints as people who want only “the ability to call other users cunts.” But for my part, it is not the ability to call anyone anything in particular that drew me to the SDMB; it was the sense that here was an online community where intelligence - and quality of expression - were valued.
I think this policy is a reversal of this, a blow on behalf of ignorance. The idea that “fuck you” is somehow automatically stupid and uncreative and a string of words you pulled from Roget’s is indicative of greater intelligence and creativity is just flat wrong; it’s intellectual pretentiousness at its worst. I personally value choosing exactly the right words to convey exactly the meaning I want, and in some cases, “go fuck yourself” is precisely right and a string of donkey-penis references is simply not. I want the ability to choose the right words (or to make the attempt, anyway), because the precision of language is my particular interest.
Cervaise has rightly received acclaim for some of his longer, more elaborately worded insults, but I have seen him offer much shorter, blunter, and more profane insults, as well. That he is able to use them correctly and in their proper places is an indication, to me, that he is intelligent - certainly more so than someone who expends huge amounts of effort trying to find a $50 equivalent to “asshole” when “asshole” is exactly the right word, because he’s convinced himself that “asshole” is inherently smarter.
Specific words, specific constructions, are never stupid or unimaginative on their own. The failure to recognize this suggests that the commitment to intelligence that this board purports to have is really a commitment to the appearance of intelligence - to the ability to say, "look, our discourse is elevated because we don’t say ‘fuck you’ - and the ignorance and pseudo-intellectualism of that stance is disappointing to me as a user.