"I used to swear a lot. I like swearing, and I love reading people who do it well."

Oh, lord — is that swearing? — I'm going with a second Kevin Drum quote this morning — and a second post traced to the netroots convention. But anyway, this is a different subject: The use of rough language among friends and in blogging that used to be written in the style of talking to your friends but is now written with the intent to reach the whole political world, which isn't going to listen properly if you talk like that. Was the bad language ever good, and if it was, what have we lost? We do still want blogging to sound like the way we'd talk to friends, don't we?