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Well, obviously. It's just that we seem to have discussions of profanity every so often, but I haven't seen much in the way of discussion of other things (aside from hideous ebook formatting) which can be wrong with books. As I said, I find it intriguing that one specific aspect of badness is such a focus ... to the point, in fact, that you want to rate books for what kind of words they have in them, but not for whether their characters are Mary Sues, or their plots are derivative, or they seem to have been written by toddlers.
Hence my interest. I'm at least idly curious as to why certain words can make or break a book purchase, at least to the point of posting about it on MR, but other things which are as bad or worse, in my personal opinion, get a pass.
If I find a character saying ... well, let's pick a neutral word, a character saying "window" ... annoying, I can just skim over every instance of "window". But if I find a character never having to put out much of an effort to overcome all opposition annoying, there's no way to skim over that. And it's not nearly as easy to spot when you're thumbing through the book, especially a pbook in a store, at least not without giving yourself excessive spoilers. Or a mystery I read the other day ... you know the things they tell you not to do in those essays about writing mysteries? Like, oh, having the murderer be someone who wasn't even in most of the book? And having the detective use some knowledge unavailable to the reader? Yeah, I read something like that with covers on. I didn't find out until I'd read it to the end (although admittedly the dismal writing made me suspicious). I couldn't have found out how it ended without reading the end, which would of course have wrecked the whole point of buying a mystery. Instead, I wasted a few hours of my time, and added another author to my "don't buy" list. If there's a rating for what kind of words authors use, shouldn't there be a rating for stupid endings to mysteries, too? They're a lot harder to spot on a quick thumb-through.
And there we get into the big problem with rating systems in general. You want one that rates the kind of words used in books. Someone else might want one that rates the amount of violence. Someone else might want one that rates the attitude toward religion. Another person would want one that covers whether alcohol is treated positively or negatively. I would definitely want a Mary Sue rating. By the time we're done, the book cover has so many ratings on it that there's no room for the art, or maybe even the title.
The government that has the power to make other people do what you want has the power to make you do what other people want ... and that may not be what you want.
Since this thread has veered off into religious territory more than once already, I'll take it a little way back there: Let's say the government of your country wanted the power to make your religion mandatory. People would have to obey your religious rules, give money to your church, etc. That sounds great, doesn't it? Wouldn't you vote for that? But a few years from now, a different government is elected. They favor a different religion -- one that you don't like. Now some other religion is mandatory. To use the current bugaboo, all of a sudden Sharia law is the law of the land, and that applies to you, too. Wait, how did that happen? That's not what you wanted. You wanted everyone to follow your beliefs, not you having to follow someone else's! But you gave the government that power ... and when you give power to a government, you can't tell what they're going to do with it; only that the odds are it's not going to be what you expected.
There are way too many people who say "I want everyone to have the freedom to do what I want them to do." That's why restricting books that have "naughty" words in them would be very, very bad. Someone would decide to restrict books for some other reason ... and some other ... and some other. It's been done. It didn't work out very well.
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