Bad language is everywhere in the media. I there anything that shocks us anymore? And yet, we make gestures at protesting. “We obsess over the encroachment of vulgar words into public spaces on pain of a stark inconsistency, one that will appear even more ridiculous to future generations than some Victorians calling trousers “nether garments” does to us. At least the Victorians’ vocabulary taboos reflected mores that permeated society. Theirs was a world in which an author of a slang dictionary would have had trouble finding a publisher, people sequestered themselves under reams of fabric, illegitimate birth was a scandal, and sex was never spoken of in polite society.”