Return of the attack of the language police

I have never quite understood the totemic power a subclass of prudes attribute certain naughty words in our language. Yes, there are vulgar words in our language that should not be used in polite situations or formal settings or when you want to impress someone with your genteel and refined nature. But life does not consist entirely of those situations. And art does not depict only those situations. But that doesn't stop the language police. Maybe it's an expansion of the commandment "Thou shalt not swear by the name of THE LORD in vain", or even of the Judaic tradition of not saying the name of God (Jehovah!). Maybe these people believe that certain words have Yucky Magical Power and that the FCC must do its utmost to prevent their utterence lest hordes of demons be unleashed upon the world.

The incident that's provoking this litte diatribe on my part is this one, described by the CJR Daily:

For the second time in three years, a major network looks like it might cave in to puritan activists who aim to cleanse prime time television of four-letter words. And just like last time, the youth are apparently at risk of being corrupted not by the violence of the fare in question, but by the nasty language the people on screen use in between bouts of violence.

The documentary in question this time, 9/11, is a fairly straightforward account of the events in Lower Manhattan that day in 2001, and contains the only known video footage of the first plane strike -- shot by two French filmmakers making a documentary about New York firefighters in Lower Manhattan that morning. As you can imagine, amid the confusion and chaos, the firefighters uttered a few choice turns of phrase, and it's this bit of history that some cultural prudes want bleeped out. What's funny -- or sad, depending how you look at it -- is that the unedited documentary was previously aired twice by CBS, profanity intact and without incident, on both the six-month and one-year anniversaries of the attacks.

Pathetic. If my contempt-o-meter hadn't been broken already after hearing about this, it would be broken now. If I thought any of these puritanical language sissies read Internal Monologue, I'd sign off this post with a string of profanities. But as I suspect that they do not, I will spare my regular readers the indecency. I believe obscene words, like all words, should be used correctly. And I imagine that for firefighters in New York City on 9/11, there were at least several occasions where the right word was not "fiddlesticks". And I believe that a documentary should be about something that happened, not about what some hyper-sensitive linguistic prude wishes had happened. It blows my mind that someone could watch a documentary about something so horrible and evil and psychologically devastating to our country as the 9/11 attacks, and find it in themselves to be offended because they hear some of the people in those hellish circumstances use naughty words. How completely backwards and idiotic is that? I long to live in a society free of such idiocy.