Profanity Doesn't Work

You're sitting in a meeting to talk about strategy next quarter. Ideas are flying. People are talking over each other. Every so often someone scrawls something on a whiteboard. Then they start talking about dates and "quick wins." Estimates get thrown out, which inspires another furious rush of discussion.

You keep trying to interject. You lost two engineers a month ago. Another one has put in his notice. You hired a bright kid a week ago, but he's going to need time to ramp up. You keep trying to say that hiring needs to be the focus of any new strategy, because nothing's getting done if you don't have the engineers to do it. You keep trying to raise this point and get the group to talk about how you can redouble your recruiting efforts, but everybody wants to talk about "establishing social media channels" and "improving our performance marketing network."

So finally, you sigh, and raising your voices a couple notches, you say:

"There is no way we're doing to do ANY OF THIS SHIT with our current staff."

The room quiets down. All heads turn to you.

Then the CEO says, "All right, let's talk about recruiting."

The frequency of swearing increases as you descend the ranks of society down to the lowest levels, down to the floor where you have drunken hobos sleeping in their own filth on the side of the road. Where profanity is the most common.

I support your right to use profanity, and I support my right to judge you poorly for it.

PROFANITY IS KIND OF LIKE USING ALL CAPS TO GET PEOPLE TO READ THIS POST. ALL CAPS IS A GREAT WAY TO GET YOUR POINT ACROSS RIGHT!

It is a poor man who relies upon swearing to have an impact upon his readers or listeners. I view it similar to "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

Swearing may get the attention of people though it seems like a quick fix that won't last. You know what else gets people's attention? Slapping them. :P What is more lasting is effective teaching skills and telling stories well and to do these well it requires practice and study. Instead of swearing try asking a good question that will get them thinking and again, good questions usually take preparation and it's not 'bad' to prepare questions as some people seem to think all good questions must be thought up on the spot.

The author mentions that it's more likely that Americans (Or rather, native English speakers) find the words more 'offensive' than other countries and I've noticed this too in a few Asian countries. For example, when I was in the Philippines and we'd be talking to kids/teenagers and some would outright swear (Sometimes at you) though were ignorant of it's true meaning/effect and simply had heard it on movies/TV shows and the internet.

Profanity has a purpose. It expresses strong dissatisfaction, quite eloquently in my opinion. The article was called "Don't Give Your Users Shit Work", and maybe ZH could have gotten the point across by saying "Don't Burden Your Users With Unnecessary Tedium". But seriously, "shit work" more accurately conveys the soul-crushing awfulness of it all. Listening to this author's ideas on what constitutes appropriate (who asked him anyway?) is unnecessarily handicapping one's ability to communicate.