Country Matters: A Personal History of Swear Words

In this humorous and playful short book arguing against censorship of language and recounting his own evolution from repressed prude to libertarian, freewheeling slinger of juicy-Lucy words, the author suggests that sexual words, slang, and wordplay are "to be celebrated as joyous, vital, funny, juicy, the very essence of life. Man is a neutered animal without them; polite language is effete, artificial, and an unspoken admission of one's total and abject submission to the System." 

Still, in the large and growing-ever-larger vocabulary of naughty words, there is a hierarchy, which is explained with humor and wordplay in the book's central essay, "What Do You Call It? A Gentleman's Opinionated Guide to the Basic Words."

This hierarchy is personal, and has nothing to do with political correctness. The only truly "bad" words, the author suggests, are monstrosities like "birthing," "interfacing," and "modalities."