I will have to side with the “cunt” haters(sorta). It has little to do with the female pudenda, as some may imply, at least for me. I don’t even think about that when I hear the word. :shrug: Maybe it is so viscous to me because it was the last swear I learned? Don’t think I heard it used until sixth or seventh grade.
Now that I think about it, I may have first read it in a Stephen King novel as opposed to hearing it. :shrug partII:
There are many silly things humans do, and reacting strongly to a single noise is one of them. We can’t beat the monkey out of us, I tell ya. In fact, you know, I would almost posit that the meaning behind the word is actually incidental to the “swearing phenomenon.” “Nigger,” for example, means “black person.” What is derogatory about being black? Nothin’. “Fuck” means “copulation” and yet we may say copulation all damn day. We may refer to scatalogical matters but not talk about shit in mixed company. Swearing is a joke and though I still flinch when I hear “cunt” I now try and think of the sweet thing that the word actually means over whatever apelike response I get when I hear it.
My politeness around new people, however, takes much more conscious effort than unconsciously (ie- not being aware that I’m doing so but still being conscious :p) saying “shit” and “fuck” all the time, which I really do, and so it would not suprise me if a coworkre came up to me and said, “You know erl, you sure got a filthy mouth.” Still unawares that I have let such a habit slip I would do a breath-check 
However, I am aware that an expression of unfounded or unreasonable hatred (if any hatred was reasonable) may be found among these gutteral sounds such as “spoon,” “banana,” “fag,” “kike,” and so on. This always made me think of the first black couple to move into my otherwise white suburban neighborhood. I often wondered what would happen if I walked right up to him and said, “You nigger.” (no exclaimation point) Preferably, my though experiment includes him wearing his daily white-collar clothes apart from, say, some leisure gear. My opinion is that he would be more offended at my ignorance than by the implication that he was in some way inferior since he clearly knew he wasn’t inferior. Much like, I figured, when someone called me a redneck. I actually laugh. I can’t even sucessfully imitate a southern accent none-the-less have any behavior associated with the south. On top of that, I laugh even further thinking that these “rednecks,” apart from being workers who do labor outside in the sun, would similarly laugh at being called a yank.
“But when they say ‘nigger’ they don’t mean ‘black person’.”
“But when they say ‘redneck’ they dont mean an ‘outside laborer.’”
If you know this why are you then associating it with the word???
Add to this list “shit.” When someone says “shit!” they don’t mean, “Well there is clearly a small quantity of solid human waste here before me!” they mean “wow” or “oops” or any number of generic exclamations, and those aren’t bad, eh?
In other words, we hate swear words because they are a “vulgar” way of saying something that could be said “unvulgarly” (whatever THAT is supposed to mean) and we hate racial slurs because they use normal words to say hateful things.
OK, whatever, just don’t be suprised when I say “Fuck you nigger” to my arab friend, and he asks me to suck his dick with full knowledge that I wouldn’t. We’re just little hairless monkeys "oo oo"ing at each other. This is why I am also trying to actually think of a vagina when I hear cunt, because there surely isn’t anything wrong with those. 