Swearing was once rare, reserved to convey the utmost shock, pain or rage, or the deepest disappointment, disgust or disbelief.

The audiences at "Gone with the Wind" in 1939 were scandalized and titillated when Scarlett O'Hara asked Rhett Butler what would become of her if he left, and Rhett, played by Clark Gable, replied, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

At the signing of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Vice President Joe Biden told President Barack Obama, "This is a big f—-ing deal." The then-veep at least had the discretion to whisper the obscenity, but his words were picked up on a hot mic for all to hear.

No such propriety exists today either on movie screens or in the political arena. This year's Netflix release "The Rip," starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, used the f-word and its derivatives over 300 times. On July 29, Donald Trump told Fox News what was in store for Iran this way: "We're going to beat the f—-ing s—- out of them." The same day on Capitol Hill, GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno asked the former head of the Centers for Disease Control, Anthony Fauci, "Who the f—- do you think you were for doing that?"

Trump and Moreno wanted to appear like tough guys, I guess, but instead they came across as over-the-top performers playing a role, lacking anything like the acting chops of Gable, Damon or Affleck.

No one would have gasped in 1939 if they'd been accustomed to hearing "damn" on the screen. The expletive was effective and shocking because it was so rare. Today "damn" is regarded as too mild for dramatic use, and even the f-word has lost all power to shock unless it emerges from the mouth of a young child and maybe not even then; a 2013 article in The American Journal of Psychology found that the surveyed children ages 5-6 already had a taboo vocabulary of about 42 words that ranged from cuckoohead to the f-word.

It's time to demand more from movies than protagonists mowing down bad guys with their AR-15s while shouting out four-letter words. Screenwriters and producers could and would do better if the public demanded more originality.

Whether on stage or screen, Shakespeare's King Lear does not call his ungrateful daughter Goneril a mere four-letter word. He curses her as "a boil, a plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood." Now we're talking!

Perry White, Clark Kent's boss in the Superman TV show and movies, doesn't exclaim, "What the f—-!" He says, "Great Caesar's Ghost!" In "Gone with the Wind," Scarlett does without even a "damn it" at moments of consternation, instead exclaiming "fiddle-dee-dee." Kind of charming, don't you think?

In Paddy Chayefsky's 1959 play "The Tenth Man," a character disdains saying his daughter-in-law should go to hell and instead resorts to an old Yiddish curse: "May she grow like an onion with her head in the ground." So much better.

And as for politicians, they want us to understand we are living in fraught times and turn to expletives so we can feel how dire are the dangers we face and how despicable are the enemies we confront. It would be far more helpful to have words to explain than empty expletives to incite. By simply saying of the Iranians, "We're going to beat the f—-ing s—- out of them," Trump fails to spell out why bombing bridges and civilian water infrastructure is warranted. Rather than explaining policy differences, he's accused Democrats of "wasting everyone's time and energy on BULLS—-."

In a live political event, Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla., answered a critic, "You would say some s—- like that. F—- you!" That diatribe doesn't do much to explain the differences between the two. And yet voters seem to reward the attention-grabbing that obscene speech generates. Trump sets the example by his use of four-letter bombs.

For adults, the use of swear words has become a crutch, and, as with all cliches, a sign of intellectual laziness and a way to avoid original, thoughtful speech. Alas.

This month I'm busy polishing my novel that will be out next spring. Just for fun, I searched the manuscript for the s-word and f-word: I found the former used 35 times and the latter 30. Sure, it's a thriller, but that's still no excuse for such a lack of imagination. Way back in 1934, Cole Porter famously observed in "Anything Goes": "Good authors, too, who once knew better words / Now only use four-letter words."

Please excuse me. I've got some editing to do.

A renaissance man, Keith Raffel has served as the senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, started a successful internet software company, and had six books published including five novels and a collection of his columns. He currently spends the academic year as a resident scholar at Harvard. You can learn more about him at keithraffel.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at creators.com.

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