John McWhorter joins the debate:
[L]anguage can express a concept from various angles, positively or negatively, or with a noun or a verb. For example, a journalist once marveled that an obscure language of India has a verb referring to how a baby is fat and treats this as evidence of a unique “way of seeing the world”—neglecting that our term baby fat refers to exactly the same concept, just with a different part of speech.
In the same way, if Americans use the word decency less than before, since the sixties we have marked our awareness of exactly that concept with none other than asshole. As Geoff Nunberg’s clever book taught us last year, the word refers precisely to someone who transgresses rules in cognizance of doing so, such as cutting people off in traffic. The asshole transgresses decency, in which we are interested as the Victorians. We just happen to refer to it with a noun, and a negative one, and also with a certain pungency, because the sixties happened and changed how we process profanity.
The Dish 