I believe it's profanity's versatility that's doomed it - made it banned from formal setting. You can easily add profanity to your sentence, or replace words with profanity, and it doesn't change much about the sentence other than its intensity and register, and there's not much of a limit to how saturated with profanity your sentence can be.
This can also be reversed; you can remove curse words from your sentence, or replace them, without much change in meaning, only affecting the intensity and register of what you're saying. Curse words are "useless" because they don't change the meaning and are easily replaceable; that's why we don't like them in formal setting, where every word should count and be used consciously.
Using curse words is a sign of low effort because they're so easy to use, and it may be taken as disrespectful because the speaker didn't care enough to find other words. That's what I believe is the reason we don't like them anyway.
I could remove the F word from "Shirley is effing beautiful", or replace it with a different intensifier, like
incredibly, and the sentence means the same thing.
I can reword "Don't eff with me!" to "Don't play (around) with me!", and the meaning is intact.
It sure would be nice and polite to tell someone to "stop bothering me and go away", but I might not feel like being nice and polite. I might just want to simply say "eff off" and go about my day. It's easy. It's effective. It's dismissive.
I think this is also why we don't like some other overused words, like
like used like every other word, and it's like so annoying when someone speaks like that. Some people are even annoyed by using
very too much because it's very easy to use
very, and very often people even stack
verys in a very very very long string, which is very annoying.
I like what this long-ass but pretty effing awesome
article has to say about curse words.
