Every once in a while, unrelated events sometimes suggest a pattern to me. The other day, as I was traveling bumper to bumper on a side street, one car wanted to get through the clogged mess at an intersection and edged in front of the car before me, briefly checking oncoming traffic before turning in the opposite direction. As soon as he was able to make the turn, though, the driver jammed on the brakes and jumped out of the car. He ran over to the driver he had edged in front of, and turned the air blue with threats. One could only assume a hand gesture had appeared at some point and was being answered.
Later that day, I listened to two young men have a pleasant, joking conversation on a train I was riding. In the happiest tones, these two got their points across by using obscenities in every grammatical variety, as 
nouns, verbs, adjectives, and all in a tone only the deaf would have missed.
Once at home, I picked up a New York newspaper and saw a story about the ongoing trial involving a female employee of Madison Square Garden Corporation, suing the coach of Knicks for verbal abuse and sexual harassment and the Knicks for a retaliatory firing. The two sides’ agreed on little, of course, but one common ground was agreement that vulgarities had been uttered on a regular basis, had been used as forms of address, and were defended as commonplace phrases.
This is nothing new, really, but I think it never does any harm to sound yet another alarm when degradation is in the air. Words do have meaning, and if we all get lazy and throw away what used to be called good manners and decorum because they’re too stuffy or involve too much restraint, the respect that is often the point of contention when a tirade erupts is going to be thrown away, too.
Good manners is not a sign of unnecessary formality or weakness. It is putting other people at their ease, and taking the time to choose words and actions carefully isn’t a waste of time, it elevates society.
In other words, as with most sound concepts, a win-win.
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