Say what?

I was just watching the Norwegian evening news with Inki and Andor. The local soccer team is called Brann ("Fire") and is the perennial bridesmaid of the Norwegian Premier League. They haven´t won the league title in so long that I wonder when they made the mistake of trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees. But anyway...they´re playing a UEFA Cup qualifier tonight against a team from Northern Ireland and the coach is resting a number of key players, leading the reporter to question why they aren´t fielding their strongest team. The coach insisted that the league title, not the UEFA Cup, was their main priority and went on to say, "Det har vært mye skriving i mediene om at vi ikke har trent nok, at vi ikke tar det alvorlig. Det er bare bullshit. Vi vil vinne serien..."
That´s when I started to laugh. I was not expecting to hear that. Not on the six o´clock national news. Norwegian makes do for the most part without vulgarisms, so much so that it apparently has to import them. "Fa´en ta deg" (literally "the devil take you") is considered pretty strong, whereas in the US the man-hours spent each year thinking up new ways to accuse someone of deviant/incestuous/homosexual/bestialistic/necrophiliac/hemophiliac behavior could probably cure cancer three times over. You think we Americans would be inured to them by now. But no, when our president uses that same word to describe terrorist agitations in a private aside to Tony Blair in front of an open mike, there´s a huge uproar. When a Norwegian soccer coach uses it to characterize his press coverage on the six o´clock news, no one blinks. No one thinks to bleep it. Nothing.
I used to make my students give me push-ups for each curse word they used. I was careful not to be a hypocrite about it, and when the school van I was driving was cut off by a reckless driver on a school trip and I had to swerve out of the way, I let one fly myself but was sure to give the students in the back the requisite twenty push-ups as soon as we had parked the van. I managed to hold my tongue, though, when I broke my leg in front of the whole school later that year. It´s hard to do push-ups on a broken leg.
Vulgarity has become such a part of everyday language in the US, and I punished students for cursing not because I never wanted them to curse, but because I realized that a lot of them weren´t aware they were cursing. Many would ask, "What did I say?" There are so many curse words out there now that they barely register with anyone who can name a hip-hop artist not named Eminem. Curses are to be used judiciously. They´re the conversational equivalent of going nuclear. There are times to go nuclear, I know. Just not with your teacher and not when you forgot to bring your pencil to class.