[Explicative Deleted]

With my naiveté, I was shocked by the proliferation of profanity among my classmates when I first entered high school. I was similarly surprised by the liberal application of "fucking" to describe just about any noun, verb, and adjective.

So I was a sheltered child, who believed that swears were only used by big, bad, ugly men. However, within these few years, "fuck" was evolved into a valuable part of my vocabulary along with many slightly milder swears. I use these words with discretion, of course, never shouting it down the halls or using it in front of my parents. In the vocabulary of my mind, on the other hand, uncensored by the politeness of society, "fuck" takes a much for dominant position.

On the bus back to school from the US history AP, a fellow student described his reaction to the essays with a string of loudly enunciated "fucks," complete with hand gestures reminiscent of a strangling. This utter lack of discretion for profanity led me to think about the profusion of foul language that has sprung up in writing.

As with anything in this Internet age, the influence of the internet is undeniable. It has provided a forum for debate with no codified rules or threshold of intelligence. As a result, profanity is often substituted for the ability to fully articulate, or even form, an argument. I don't mean to broadly generalize every corner of the Internet, as there are many pockets of intelligent discussion folded in the general mess, but the vast majority of so-called debate is nothing more than a few rounds of name-calling.

I'm not saying that people on the Internet are stupid; it's merely that the anonymity of the Internet shields us from shame should we say something that truly is stupid. It often takes less than 10 posts in a forum before the debate has degenerated into something like, "It's so fucking stupid." While I'm certain that "stupid" is not engaging in sexual intercourse with anyone or any word for that matter, profanity only distracts from the actual argument, provided there is one.

I am always irked when "fucking" is used to describe a word when another adjective would be a much better substitute. There's no the denying the crude power of such a explicit word, though that power has been declining with its increasingly frequent usage. In any event, using "fucking" to describe a word is like using a grenade to assassinate a president when a sniper could do the job much more cleanly and neatly. There's a reason it's called the F-bomb.