In praise of… swearing

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/29/in-praise-of-swearing

Version 0 of 1.

Dostoevsky wrote millions of words in his lifetime but once said that everything a Russian might think or speak could be expressed with only one. This word, khuy, or prick, which is the root of 500 others in one Russian dictionary, is banned from tomorrow from use in public under one of Vladimir Putin's puritanical ordinances. Along with a very few others, Dostoevsky's word is at the root of "mat", the Russian language of profanity. Centuries of oppression, despair and inventive drunkenness have gone into mat. The writer Victor Erofeyev described it in the New Yorker as "a philosophy" of life. Indeed, Russia would grind to a halt without its lubrication of the innumerable frictions of everyday life. This will not happen. Putin's purpose is not so much to stamp it out as to keep it hidden from respectable eyes. He stands for a new Russia built on repression of every sort. We raise instead two fingers to salute the Russian mat.