A moment's thought about the swearing illness reveals an intruiging problem. The sufferer's thinking is 'disrupted' enough to cancel the censoring of speech, but not too disrupted to be able to pick abrasive and rude words.
From what I have read on the topic, the swearing - called coprolalia - is actually not that common, but it nonetheless seems interesting that what is absent in a coprolalic person is precisely that which is required to give cuss words their force (ie, awareness of conversational and societal conventions). This suggests that the screening that we carry out in everyday talk - 'holding our tongues' - takes place on a relatively superficial plane. In contrast, it appears that words like 'fuck' are completely soaked in meaning. The sense of strong words cannot be erased or suspended, no matter what amount of personal control is lost: bad words can never lose their badness.
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