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> bland hellscape of conformity

I see three reasons to use swearwords sparingly, even though they don’t particularly offend me.

1 Managing my own emotions. Most swearing is negative and that drags you down which is not very productive or fun.

2 Managing others‘ emotions as they burst out, which stresses the people around the swearer.

3 Some people just can’t say a fucking sentence without gratuitous swearing which makes them sound fucking stupid.






I know someone who generally does not swear directly at people, but uses swear words profusely when angry and believes it is unreasonable for anyone to judge them or have negative feelings about this, because it's just words and they aren't swearing AT people.

A few years ago, they went to a fan event here in Japan hoping to buy multiple copies of a zine for their friends overseas, and when told they could only buy one copy, they stood in front of the stall and cursed profusely in English out of frustration. After the event, they found that the Japanese side of the fanbase had unfriended them and removed them from online communities because of their outburst. They were completely blindsided by this. (In fact, their version of the story was just, "I went to an event in person and after that everyone unfriended me, I don't know why they're like this." I only heard about the swearing incident from a mutual friend.)

Anyway, there's obviously degrees and nuance here but I think people who swear profusely-but-not-at-anyone-specifically don't realize it still sometimes comes across as hostile.


> 3 Some people just can’t say a fucking sentence without gratuitous swearing which makes them sound fucking stupid.

I think this is subjective.


It’s also incredibly cultural.

Swearing in the workplace is much more normal here in Australia. In my first job at an American company, I was shocked how prissy people were about swearing. In my head I thought “these are adults, right? Why is everyone acting like a blushing teenager?”. I’m sure I sounded rough as guts to them. It took ages to learn to scale it back depending on who I was talking to.

Swearing with someone about / at work is kinda an Australian way to say “I trust you and feel relaxed around you”. Forcing myself to not swear felt at first like I was pretending I didn’t like my coworkers. It was weird.


Similar thing in the US. I was in a company that merged with a company in Texas and several of the executives would use the F-word in every other sentence. HR asked if we were offended in California and I said that I personally don't care but would be nice if they would stop doing this on customer calls customers that pay millions of dollars per quarter and are professionals. Our new CEO showed up late to a meeting with a big customer wearing his biker outfit and he too swore a lot. In the end we lost a lot of customers from this. The CEO did not care, he was a Chicago mobster and expected everyone to kiss his butt.

I work in Texas and this is definitely a real thing. In person and within the company, sometimes swearing happens. It would certainly get you in trouble if it happened a lot on customer calls though. We may not care personally about it, but who knows what your customers opinion on it is, so it is better to be polite. It is also very easy to just try not to swear unless you are one of those people that has been swearing like a sailor in every sentence your entire life, which would probably be interpreted as you having some kind of self control problem.

I should also mention that this attitude is not just a liberal vs conservative thing. I've lived in Austin and Houston and Dallas (all three are about as liberal as any other major city in the country) and swearing in a formal setting is frowned upon in all three.


This is a great real world example of why we need cultural competency training. Here it would be an HR led class where we practice swearing while talking to the new Aussie coworker(s) in order to make them feel comfortable and improve their performance and ease onboarding.

> HR led class Ugh really? Another one?

> where we practice swearing Oh well hang on a second…that could be fun


You should find the Australian HR Slur Song on Tumblr.


I would subjectivity say correct…

Swearing is like a pen. You can use it to draw a crude penis in a bathroom stall, or you can use it to create amazing works of art.

Especially online it's just so easy to confuse or miscommunicate "fuck that :-)" and "fuck that grrr"

I don't think swearing is necessarily negative though; it can often be fairly neutral, or funny/positive. But again: in text it can be tricky.


Hey I use fucking in every fucking possible way but I'm only slightly fucking stupid ok? Fuck man.



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