The Mechanics and Rhetoric of Conversation : Page 40

If you want to be a pleasing and refined talker, you will proscribe profanity and obscenity altogether and absolutely, but you will also ration yourself against these other, morally indifferent epithets. It is good to start by making a list of those you remember using in the past month. Of these, you then determine to eliminate the ugliest ones altogether, and consciously set about using the others less frequently. Surely, talk sprinkled with expletives is unbecoming a really refined and efficient person. One cannot imagine them in the speech of St. Thomas More or Joan of Arc. To overcome the habit, the best procedure, as with vice, of which Pope says that to be hated it "needs but to be seen," is to become conscious of it. Avoidance should follow naturally.