It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m buying overpriced bread in an overpriced supermarket in Piata Amzei. The little girl next to me is trying to get her mum to buy her chocolate. Suddenly the music over the tannoy catches my attention. “F*** what I said, It don’t mean s*** now …” It’s Eamon, whose embarrassingly weak ballad ‘F*** It (I Don't Want You Back)’ shot to the top of the charts last year, entirely due to the fact that it contains some 32 expletives. It sounds like R.Kelly with Tourette’s syndrome. The mother to my left, however, doesn’t look at all concerned. The next song? I almost drop my basket. “I don’t care what you say about me…” It’s none other than 50 Cent. “I’m the motherf***ing P.I.M.P.” The song is, of course, heavily censored everywhere in the west (but only for its use of swearing; nobody seems to care about its glorifying the practice of selling women into the sex industry.) Being an upstanding moral citizen, I have to try to restrain myself from placing my hands over the child’s ears. But, oblivious, the staff keep on stacking the shelves, the child keeps pestering her mother, and nobody bats an eyelid.

Swearing has always had an important place in music history, with song being one way of saying what would have been unacceptable in everyday life. British ‘music hall’ songs in the 1870s had lyrics that would probably make a porn-star blush, and even the names of a number of musical genres, such as ‘Boogie-woogie’ and ‘Funk’, were veiled euphemisms for the unmentionable – sex.

Special mention in the history of musical swearing has to go to The Sex Pistols, who managed to be the first people ever to use the word ‘f***’ on daytime TV, and were banned from television as a result. Their only album ‘Never Mind the B****cks’ shot to number one in October 1977, but the album title was replaced with a black line in the official chart listings.

However, it’s not punk, but Hip Hop which has pride of place when it comes to swearing. The rap group NWA were famous for their obscene lyrics. Over the internet, you can even buy a novelty copy of their seminal 1988 album ‘Straight outta Compton ’ which has everything in the music edited out except for the swear worlds. Their track ‘F*** Tha Police’ is edited down to just 42 seconds of pure, unadulterated swearing – meaning that a staggering 12% of the original track is made up of expletives. Perhaps I’m the only person over the age of 13 who finds this funny. However, there actually happens to be a very serious side to this use of obscenities.

NWA even had their name censored – the initials stand for ‘Niggaz With Attitude’. Many people, like the black comedian Chris Rock, see NWA as a turning point in the use of the word ‘nigger’. There is a fairly convincing theory that suggests that NWA took a word that was previously only ever used in a racist context, and gave it back to the black community. What is indisputable is that nowadays, practically ever rap record contains the word, mostly as a term of endearment. Exactly the same thing happened with the word ‘queer’ within the gay community. What started out as an offensive term was ‘reclaimed’, becoming a word that gay people themselves used without shame.

The same thing needs to happen in Romania . I’d like to see more academic, intelligent, high-browed swearing. English newspapers like the Guardian have absolutely no problem in printing obscenities, and some of my favourite journalists are utterly foul-mouthed in print. We need to re-claim swear-words from football players, taxi-drivers and Gigi Becali. Maybe I should start the ball rolling. If 50 cent can do it in a supermarket, I don’t see why anyone should complain if I pepper my own writing with expletives. After all, swearing sells records. Perhaps it works the same way for magazines. F***ing great!