The Necessity of Curse Words

The shorter of the short people has become fascinated with curse words. The idea that there are culturally forbidden sounds makes these sounds interesting. As a reuslt, he's invented his own, nork (the sound made by the Siamese elephants in Tim Conway's famous bit). He loves that it is functionally equivalent to words he knows he cannot say, but because it is his word, he can say it. Do we need words that perform the rhetorical functions of swear words? Do they do what no other linguistic entities are capable of doing or are they just short cuts to utterances that could be expressed otherwise?