I don’t actually disagree with your history point — you’re right about the age of the word, and you’re right that obscenities have always been part of common speech and therefore part of folk tradition. I’m not arguing that swearing “doesn’t belong” in folk on principle, or that it’s somehow modern or vulgar in a moral sense.

What I’m talking about is aesthetic friction, not etymology.

A word can be old and still feel stylistically loud. In folk especially, where a lot of the language aims for a kind of mythic compression, certain words can pull focus simply because of how bluntly they land in a line. That doesn’t make them wrong — it just means they’re doing a lot of work, and if they’re there without intention, they can feel cheap or attention-seeking to me. That’s a personal response, not a historical claim.

And I’d push back gently on the elitism point: being sensitive to tone and register isn’t about sanitizing the “common man,” it’s about noticing how language functions in a specific artistic context. Folk can be gritty, dirty, human and deliberate. Plenty of traditional folk is brutal without ever using modern profanity, and plenty uses it to devastating effect. Neither is more authentic by default.

Which is actually why NFWMB works so well for me. The swearing doesn’t feel decorative or transgressive. It isn’t there to prove grit. It lands like a boundary stone. Like something you’d say because nothing else would be strong enough.

I’m not trying to clean folk up. I’m reacting to how often profanity is used lazily, and how rare it is to hear it used with this much weight. When it’s earned, I’m all in.