Via our friend D, we discover that at Whiskey Fire, we use curse words a lot. Though we are left in the dust by Sadly No.
I don't have the book near me at the moment, but in Language and Symbolic Power Bourdieu remarks that those who are systematically excluded from the dominant discourse are "condemned to a shocking outspokenness." I think this is right.
My thinking about American politics is shaped a great deal by the 2002-3 "runup" to war in Iraq, when the pressure exerted by dominant elites to speak in only certain powerfully restricted forms was at its most stifling. So much for free speech: if you disagreed with the war, you were denied the position from which to say so in any effective form. If you had some sort of media capital, well, it was made clear to you that you'd have to expend all of it to take the shocking (if empirically correct) position. Certainly, you could not join in with the DFHs on the street: those people had nothing! There was simply no reason to concede them any legitimacy. It would have been a bad career move, plus, your credibility would have been shot amongst your similarly subjugated peers.
Cursing, though... media figures who willingly suborn themselves to purveyors of the dominant narrative would never curse, you know...
Saying "fuck" is, in short, the declaration of linguistic independence.