How bad is the f-word, really?

This is a difficult question, because English is in the middle of a shift of social mores with regards to obscenities and vulgarities.

The "traditional" swear words (fuck, shit, ass, damn, etc.) have had their offensiveness gradually worn down over the past century, to the point where in many communities they're generic modifiers. Large parts of the Internet hold to this ethos. However, this shift is by no means complete or universal, as many people will still be offended by those words. Be very careful in unfamiliar situations with people you don't know, since you cannot easily predict how they'll react to your language.

At the same time, new language taboos are arising with regards to racial and some sexual epithets. You probably would not see an economics blog use the word "nigger" so casually, nor "fag", "cunt", or others. However, the social conventions regarding these are even more chaotic and context-sensitive than the conventions for the older expletives.

If you want to avoid giving offense, you should always stick to the most conservative, expletive-free register, as no one is going to be scandalized by your failure to say "fuck".

Relative to where and who? I wouldn't use the f word as a synonym for "very" in Salt Lake City, Utah. In the Marines it's just another word.

Cusswords are interesting neurologically, they appear to be managed by a different part of the brain than the part that is in charge of ordinary speech. So if the f-word really did become an ordinary word, (I think the Proto-Indo-European word was something mundane like "to strike"), it would need to be replaced by some other word.

More likely, a taboo word would disappear from use than convert to the stock of ordinary words.

Seeing the F word on the internet probably doesn't mean it is acceptable, the internet is the lawless wild west.

Depending on the circumstances and the company it varies between shocking (my Bridge Club) and background noise (the Steelworks), a former colleague of mine being the record holder for the most uses in one sentence (21).

See also Field-Marshal Slim's quotation of his driver reporting that the car was unserviceable..."The fucking fucker's fucked."

There is good evidence that "bad language" is stored in a separate part of the brain: witness the case of the deaf man with Tourettes syndrome who swears in ASL. And swear words in foreign languages don't set off the same triggers in the brain, so it's very hard to judge how bad they are in context. Foreign language learners should generally avoid swearing until someone else has done so first. That's my advice.

The actual question, How bad is the F-word? has a very context-dependent answer.

It seems that the FCC's 7-dirty-word rule has recently been overturned in some degree, a sign of the times:

Jul 22nd, 2010 NEW YORK CITY—Noting that, "we face a media landscape that would have been almost unrecognizable in 1978," the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has struck down attempts by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate so-called "fleeting expletives" in radio and TV broadcasts...

read article (warning: expletive ahead)