Overreactions and extreme sensitivities

The other day, a news anchor on one of the local national network channels dropped the f-bomb in a live teaser commercial just before the 11 PM news. I'm not sure how it played out because I haven't bothered to watch the actual clip, which I'm sure is on YouTube for anyone who's interested, but 1010 WINS played the audio clip repeatedly the next morning as I was listening for the weather before work. She apologized for her language around 11:10 PM during the news cast. The network has no intention of getting rid of her or relegating her to Style news.

My question is this: why are we as a society so afraid of curse words? This incident happened around 10:59 PM on a school night; shouldn't all the kids be in bed anyway, leaving only adults to hear this? If we're all adults, then chances are that we've heard this word before...hell, we've probably used it ourselves. On the very same day!

Apparently no one really cared in the city though. The sociolinguists interviewed by the NY Times for their recent article explain that New Yorkers are really desensitized to curse words in general because we hear them all around (uh, yeah. This is a tough town--sometimes you gotta swear!). One of the interesting reasons they give for our desensitization is the large number of non-native English speakers to whom English swear words don't carry the same gravitas that curses in their native languages might. Eh, maybe. I'm a native speaker and I swear all the time, so I don't know how solid that reasoning is.

I think we're desensitized because 8 million people live on top of one another on a few square miles of space, a situation which requires release in some form. Rather than running around hitting each other, we swear. Seems ok to me.