Or how to become a potty mouthed pro
If you know me, or you’ve read anything I’ve written before, it’ll be no surprise to you to hear that I’ve a full and fruity vocabulary and I’m not afraid to use it.
So, I thought it was high time I debunked some epic codswallop around the use of the swears when you’re wearing your business socks.
Friend, I’m here to tell you that if you’re a ranty swearbag in real life and you work with adults with robust life experience, it’s ok to be a ranty swearbag in work hours too.
Right, we’re done here. Fuck off.
Alas, it’s not that simple. There’s quite a lot here to examine.
But let’s start with an obvious question. Why am I talking about swearing on a professional writing website? I help coaches and consultants use words to grow your business. But I don’t want you to use any old words. I want you to use words that do two things:
Feel authentically you.
Resonate with your ideal clients.
Which is why, if swearing’s a normal part of your vocabulary, and it’s a normal part of your client’s vocabulary, it can be part of your business brand too. And there are strong reasons why making swearing part of your brand is a good idea.
It makes you real. You’re a whole sweary, stinky human.
It builds trust because you’re not pretending to be anyone other than who you are.
It connects with other sweary humans. You attract a more worldly, and dare I say it, a more fun crowd. To quote Tinydeathmachine on Twitter, “Personally, I like to surround myself with people who have extensive vocabularies but nevertheless choose to say "fuck" a lot.”
It acts as a prude filter. My experience is I don’t work well with people who can’t handle a bit of salty language. So, filtering those folks out is a definite plus.
It gives you a bit of edge. You stand out from the beige sea of corporate bland.
It’s an icebreaker. A good strategic swear at the beginning of a workshop loosens the room up. You can see people relax and start to have a better time.
And, of course, there’s the much touted research that indicates us sweary mofos are smarter than your average bear, so there’s that.
But we live in a world full of shades of grey, so there’s always a flip side to the coin and a bunch of reasons why swearing may not work for you.
Swearing can make people feel intimidated and uncomfortable. This ain’t cool.
Swearing can escalate a situation and make it more aggressive.
More conservative folks have codified swearing as unprofessional. Now you may not give a shit about this, I certainly don’t, but important to know, none the less.
Swearing in a high-profile situation can escalate into a media pile on, because there’s nothing right wing media loves more than a good pearl clutch about profanity.
So, swearing isn’t a one size fits all kinda sitch. How it’s received will depends on your context, your intent, your target, your audience, and the language you choose.
If you’re smiting your head off your desk right about now, muttering, “FFS woman, stop stating the bloody obvious,” this article probably isn’t for you, as you’ve mastered the gentle art of the situational swear. Go in peace my profane friend. But if you fancy some musings on the art of being offensive, read on.
What is offensive language?
I was prompted to write this by widespread hypocrisy around what constitutes offensive language. Some folks will have a knee-jerk reaction to a tasty little F bomb, and then blithely use words freighted with racism, ableism, or misogyny. But while we all have our own subjective interpretation of offensive, is there an objective standard for offensive language?
Let’s start by looking at some definitions.
Swearing, cursing, profanity, blasphemy, and obscenity are all rolled up in one portmanteau concept loosely labelled offensive language. But they’re subtly different things.
Swearing is the use of offensive language.
Cursing was originally the act of wishing someone harm. It’s “a solemn utterance intended to invoke a supernatural power to inflict harm or punishment on someone or something.” Over time it’s evolved to be used in a more generic way to mean “an offensive word or phrase used to express anger or annoyance.”
Profanity is blasphemous or obscene language.
Blasphemy is “speaking sacrilegiously about God or sacred things.”
Obscenity is “the portrayal or description of sexual matters offensive or disgusting by accepted standards of morality and decency.” Or offending against moral principles.
Offensive language has a legal definition in most countries.
Here in NZ, you can be liable for a fine if in any public place, you address any words to any person intending to threaten, alarm, insult, or offend that person; or if you use any threatening or insulting words and are reckless whether any person is alarmed or insulted by those words; or if you address any indecent or obscene words to any person in or within hearing of a public place. You can also be fined for simply using any indecent or obscene words in or within hearing of any public place. But I can’t find an NZ legal definition of indecent or obscene language, which indicates that deciding whether something is obscene is down to the judge on the day.
The US does not use the terminology offensive. However, obscenity and fighting words are not protected under the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Some States categorise cursing as obscene language.
Obscene language is that defined as extremely or deeply offensive according to contemporary community standards of morality or decency. In Roth v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled obscene applies to materials that appeal predominantly to a prurient interest in sexual conduct, depict or describe sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
I’m bringing the US into this because most of the main social channels businesses rely on for marketing, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, originate from the US and are influenced by their more … er, censorious culture and laws. Swear at your own risk.
So, offensiveness is typically defined in law by aggressive intent and obscenity. And obscenity is where things get interesting. Because obscenity is a statement or act which strongly offends the prevalent sexual morality of the time.
Now how’s that for shifting sand?
Not only is sexual morality a continually evolving thing, it’s also wildly idiosyncratic. Good luck with defining prevalent sexual morality in any meaningful way. Sexual morality varies between communities and cultures. One person’s healthy sex life is another person’s abomination. Perhaps we might all agree that sexual conduct that harms others is obscene. But even there, things aren’t clear cut.
So obscene is a problematic term to pin down. Which raises the question, when even legal definitions of offensive language are fraught with ambiguity, why and how do we recognise or police offensive language, and should we even try?
Shifting perceptions in offensive language
People can be offended by language that isn’t obscene or aggressive. For example, language intended to belittle a social group, or language that holds unpleasant historical baggage, or language co-opted by unreasonable ideologies.
We're becoming more comfortable with traditional swear words like bloody, bastard, damn, shit, and hell, which are considered vanilla to the point of being practically wholesome in worldly circles. But at the same time, we’re becoming more aware of the hidden offense in terms in daily use.
Recently, people I follow on social media have been educating others on language freighted with ableist slurs and encouraging us to choose other options.
They urge us to avoid the use of words such as: idiot, dumb, crazy, lame, imbecile, retarded, deaf, blind, nuts, and psycho because these words devalue people with a disability and suggest that to be like them is a terrible, insulting thing. Instead, they offer up terminology like irrational, unreasonable, irritating, frustrating, nonsensical, and ridiculous. If you’d like to become more aware of alternatives to ableist language, there’s a handy guide over here.
This growing awareness of the baggage language holds has been happening for many years. The drive for gender equality has highlighted the entrenched sexism in terms like chairman and policeman, replacing them with gender-neutral terms chair and police officer.
Activists working to reduce violence against women have raised awareness of the enabling omission in terms such as violence against women, where language obscures the fact this violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men. A more accurate phrase would be male violence against women. The Ted Talk by Jackson Katz on why violence against women is a men’s issue unpacks this linguistic obfuscation.
And of course, the English language is larded with terms with subtle and not so subtle racist undertones, phrases such as blacken, denigrate, blackhearted, blacklist, black sheep, yellow bellied, and Indian giver. And there are phrases in common use like jipped, off the reservation, and grandfathered in which have problematic racist roots.
Then there’s language that signals membership of offensive ideologies. Examples include incel terminology, with its bluepills, redpills, Chads, Stacys, Beckys, meeks et al. This overlaps with the dialect of the wider alt-right community with its blackpills, femoids, cucks and the delightful concept of hypergamy. A particularly adorable tactic of the right is to co-opt positive terminology like woke or political correctness and use them as insults. This says far more about you than it does the person you’re insulting, and using language like this is a handy red flag to the rest of us that you’re a bit of a pillock.
It can be an uncomfortable feeling when you realise you’ve been using language with unpleasant origins or offensive baggage. I’ve been caught out a few times and I felt foolish and a bit out of touch. But if kindness and respect matters to you, then language matters too.
The etymology of swearing
Is it illogical and inconsistent of me to both enjoy swearing and advocate for more mindful use of language to avoid causing painful offense? After all, some people find swearing offensive. Is their discomfort not valid too?
Maybe.
It all depends what swearwords actually mean. Profanity is self-perpetuating. Once a word is designated profane, people’s judgement of that word is coloured by its edgy status, regardless of what it actually means. But all words are simply vehicles for meaning. Sometimes the etymology of a word is problematic because it carries discriminatory history. But is this the case when it comes to our classic line up of cussing?
Take shit, piss, and arse for examples. They simply mean what they say on the tin. They’re excrement and a body part. How is that offensive? Vulgar perhaps. Offensive only if you buy into the prudish cultural baggage these words have accumulated.
How about hell and damn? When the great Christian body corporate was at the height of its power and people believed in concepts like hell and damnation, I can imagine these terms were pretty spicy. After all you’re wishing someone an eternity of misery with no hope of salvation. That’s brutal. But what about now? Well, if you’ve no religion, as almost half of the NZ population stated in the 2018 census, then these words are quaint historical anachronisms.
However, it’s possible these words still have some currency with Christians. I’m not familiar enough with contemporary Christianity to tell you if hell and damnation are still a thing. I hope not. Creating that fearful story to haunt children and the dying always struck me as one of the more reprehensible acts of an institution not short on them.
But taking kindness and respect as our guidelines, almost half of the NZ population still identified as having a religious faith in 2018, so it makes sense to minimize the use of blasphemy against all religions if you’re striving to avoid offense to social groups. Faith is a cultural construct and a matter of choice, unlike race, sex, physical ability, and sexuality, so I believe it is open to critique in a way that those are not. But it’s kind and respectful to avoid deliberate offense.
Sleeves up. Let’s look at the big guns.
Fuck’s a goody. Linguists dispute whether it originates from Scandinavia or from Germany. Either way it’s been around for many centuries, with the first recorded use in print in the early sixteenth century. It’s a vulgar way to talk about having sex. It’s also used to refer to a particularly sexually accomplished human (they’re a good fuck) and has evolved to mean I don’t care (I don’t give a fuck). Look, quite simply, sex isn’t offensive. Therefore, if you’re offended by the word fuck, you’re simply reacting to its accumulated social baggage.
Alright. Big deep breath team … cunt. Now it says an awful lot about our culture that this is considered the ne plus ultra of filthy language, because all you’re doing is calling someone a woman’s sexual organs, which sounds like a compliment to me. But in a patriarchal society that’s a terribly bad thing because if you’ve got a cunt you haven’t got a cock and therefore you’re a second-class citizen. Well fuck that for a game of soldiers … Personally I’m very fond of cunts, everyone should have one, and I’m a big fan of the approving term, a good cunt … meaning a top human or a decent sort.
So, in summary, none of our classic line up of swear words are very rude at all. We’ve simply become culturally conditioned to find them so.
Putting the arse in clarse
To sum up, here’s my totally subjective guide to mindful swearing.
I see swearing as a condiment. A little bit adds spice. Too much makes the stew inedible. Use it to vary your tone. Alternate crisp, minimalist prose with rowdy colloquialisms.
Don’t swear in anger because it can intimidate people.
Be deliberate in your intent. Swearing is the robust art of making an oath while an insult is deliberately intended to be rude. Know what you’re doing and choose the right tool for the job.
Become aware of the etymology of the words you use and develop your own code of offensive language that isn’t based on knee-jerk cultural conditioning.
Get creative with your swearing. There are four brilliant ways to do this.
1/ Use completely clean disses that are still fantastically insulting. Some top picks are:
You complete parcel.
You utter lettuce.
You total salad.
You absolute plum.
You massive nugget.
You utter sideboard.
You total radish.
You get the picture. Put complete, utter, total, absolute or massive in front of any entertaining noun and you’ve got yourself a banger of a barb.
2/ Embrace the tradition of non-swearing insults such as plonker, pillock, numpty, wazzock, plank, twerp, and duffer. It’s good (and entertaining) to look these up too so you know what they mean.
3/ Reclaim vintage swear words. This is what your notes app was really designed for. Some of my favs are thunderation, fopdoodle, bejabbers, zounds, bescumber, gadzooks, and muckspout (which I hope to have engraved on my headstone).
4/ Get literary. Shakespeare is a rich source of colourful insults including embossed carbuncle, cream-faced loon, puke-stocking, three inch fool and caddis-garter. The fictional slang Nadsat from Burgess’s Clockwork Orange gives us bratchny, droogs, and hound-and-horny. While Heller went with ficky-fick and furgle in Catch-22.
Finally, have fun with your filth. Add colour and contrast and a dash of unexpected bawdy poetry to the beige annals of business life. You’ll scare away the prudes and delight the rest of us, and ain’t that all for the best in the end?
SOURCES
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/smarter-living/the-case-for-cursing.html
https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/offence-language.html
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/employee-relations/pages/profanity-at-work-.aspx
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20160802-swearing-at-work-might-be-good-for-your-career
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210408-the-sexist-words-that-are-harmful-to-women
https://www.stats.govt.nz/news/losing-our-religion