In Middleborough, Massachusetts, it is the residents' way or the highway when it comes to swearing.

Residents in a town outside Boston have voted in favour of fining people who swear in public.

At a town meeting on Monday night, residents voted 183-50 to approve a proposal from the police chief to impose a $20 (£12) penalty on public profanity.

Officials insisted the proposal was not intended to censor casual or private conversations, but instead to crack down on loud, profanity-laden language used by teenagers and other young people in the city centre area and public parks.

"I'm really happy about it," Mimi Duphily, a store owner and former town selectwoman, said after the vote. "I'm sure there's going to be some fallout, but I think what we did was necessary."

Duphily, who runs a motor vehicle parts store, is among the city centre merchants who wanted to take a stand against the kind of swearing that can make customers uncomfortable.

"They'll sit on the bench and yell back and forth to each other with the foulest language. It's just so inappropriate," she said.

The measure could raise questions about constitutional rights on free speech, but state law does allow towns to enforce local laws that give police the power to arrest anyone who "addresses another person with profane or obscene language" in a public place.

Matthew Segal, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union ofMassachusetts, said the US supreme court has ruled that the government cannot prohibit public speech just because it contains profanity.

The ordinance gives police discretion over whether to ticket someone if they believe the swearing ban has been violated.

Middleborough, a town of about 20,000 residents perhaps best known for its rich cranberry bogs, has had a bylaw against public profanity since 1968. But because that bylaw essentially makes cursing a crime, it has rarely if ever been enforced, officials said, because it simply would not merit the time and expense to pursue a case through the courts.

The ordinance would decriminalise public profanity, allowing police to write tickets as they would for a traffic offence. It would also decriminalise certain types of disorderly conduct, public drinking and marijuana use, and shovelling snow onto the road.

Segal praised Middleborough for reconsidering its bylaw against public profanity, but said fining people for it isn't much better.

"Police officers who never enforced the bylaw might be tempted to issue these fines, and people might end up getting fined for constitutionally protected speech," he said.

Another local merchant, Robert Saquet, described himself as "ambivalent" about the no-swearing proposal.

"In view of words commonly used in movies and cable TV, it's kind of hard to define exactly what is obscene," said Saquet, who owns a furniture store.