Profanity Doesn't Work

I used to work for a company with an internet content filter. I'd search for a topic, see a promising link, and bam! the content filter blocked the page for profanity. I try to limit / self-censor my profanity in deference to the working stiffs of the world stuck in that situation.

(which was funny

I'm reminded of http://lesswrong.com/lw/13s/the_nature_of_offense/

"Specifically, to give offense is to imply that a person or group has or should have low status. Taking offense then becomes easy to explain: it’s to defend someone’s status from such an implication, out of a sense of either fairness or self-interest."

Though it can be effective, vulgarity on the web seems most often a product of laziness.

Which is not always a problem. Much content we read here is for information; many comments and blogs are little more than small talk.

We refer back to classic posts like P. Graham's because they were crafted with deliberation.

It has well-understood powers to fire off pain circuits in perfectly normal brains.

Stephen Pinker gave a talk on the subject at Google a few years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBpetDxIEMU

Swear words are swear words because they actually are processed differently in your brain than regular propositional speech is. They're the linguistic counterpart of the emotional signals used by other social animals. The difference is that the sounds associated with our signalling systems are learned as part of language, rather than being hard-coded and instinctual. Hence, there's the possibility for different people to have their brains trained in different ways. So, for some people, the "f-word" may not have any ill effect, but don't deceive yourself thinking that there aren't people who really are hurt by it. Since the psychological reaction is associated with the signal, not with whatever additional propositional meaning it might have in the language, referring to it by circumlocution really does have a point- it lets you talk about the words without risking triggering someone's reaction to the words.

I agree with Jerry Seinfeld that swearing (when writing or speaking) is not so much offensive but just a lazy way to grab people's attention. A good speaker can hold attention without resorting to swearing.

That said, I actually think that the phrase "shit work" perfectly expresses the point, and I'm not sure I would have called it anything else if I were the author.