Whether you like to admit it or not, swearing is and will be taken as a sign of disrespect or superiority. You (99% percent of us) would not drop the F-bomb in the presence of a new boss, for example, unless you had very good reason to think it was ok. It's similar to the fact that the boss teases subordinates, but the reverse is much rarer. Swearing is absolutely a status strategy, even when speaking to groups. For all the people who claim that swearing is essentially as innocuous as any other speech, and only prissy people think anything of it at all, it would be interesting to see their behavior around their professional or social superiors. There'll always be the people who pipe up to claim they treat everyone the same, and don't know what status is, but on the whole, I'm pretty sure the social implications and power dynamics of swearing show very strong patterns. Swear all you like (I do), but please don't pretend that profane language doesn't have different effects from normal language.
Swearing is also cultural/personal, and correlates with familiarity. People will swear more among friends than with strangers. "[S]wearing is and will be taken as a sign of disrespect or superiority" implies people respect their friends less than (and find them inferior to) strangers, which is absurd.
One runs a high risk swearing in the presence of a superior with an unknown stance on swearing. This causes less exploratory swearing. Do not mistake caution with respect.
A superior poses higher risk than a peer or junior. Someone can negatively react to swearing in a couple ways:
1) Deal with it directly, by talking.
2) Deal with it indirectly, by leveraging resources to harm the offending party.
A peer/junior has less destructive potential when taking option #2. As a consequence of this, people swear less around superiors than peers/juniors.
>You (99% percent of us) would not drop the F-bomb in the presence of a new boss, for example, unless you had very good reason to think it was ok.
A company I interned for had an employee who allegedly dropped an F-Bomb or two during his interview. His nickname was F-Bomb. No joke.
When someone chooses to swear for emphasis or for the shock value, he is not trying to win over the people who might be offended, or who might take it as a sign of disrespect. He is trying to win over the people who buy into his personality, in spite of the people who may be offended. The whole reason he's saying "fuck" is because it will offend some people.
F-Bomb probably didn't want to work for a boss who would be offended at someone saying "fuck". Who would?
I tend to say "fuck" a lot. I've been reading these replies and I really don't think I say it for the reasons people are hypothesizing here. I say it because it is (at this point a bad) habit.
Saying "fuck" instead of something else is a cop out. It's so easy to apply this general, emotional term, and much harder to express what you actually mean. I've taken to, after I say the word, to try and think of a better way to express myself. Rarely was it the best word choice, but it's such a habit that it's hard for me to do this analysis before I say it.
Another mode I get into is saying it out of frustration. It's like a tension release valve. It seems to make me feel more calm. Of course, during this latter use I'm almost always alone, so it's not applicable to the linked article.
You hit on it though. The word "fuck" expresses emotion and tension in a very brief desperate way. It's not a cop out if that's literally what energy you're attempting to convey. It's not always "I haven't worked hard enough on this presentation to I'm gonna say 'fuck' instead of something poignant about my frustrations with XML configuration files". Sometimes it's the very desperation that you're trying to get across and touch on.
> Whether you like to admit it or not, swearing is and will be taken as a sign of disrespect or superiority.
This is a simplistic analysis. Swearing is a device of language that can be used well or misused. Most of the time we can do better, yes, but swearing does have a place that is neither disrespectful or superior [1]. What would John McClane, one of the greatest movie characters of all time [2], be without that classic line?
One nuance to this is that not all profanity is created equally. Essentially none of the people here that would drop the F-bomb in a presentation would utter the word "cunt" in any remotely professional environment. It connotes disrespect much more strongly and status perhaps very little, probably negatively.
Interestingly enough 10 minutes before reading this I told my boss that: "Visual studio is a fucking cunt and I will kill you if my phone starts ringing every 5 minutes like it did at 3am because you where fucking up the builds." He laughed...
I guess it just comes down to the corporate culture of where you work. I also got asked what my thoughts where on C# and .Net on my interview... I said "It fucking sucks..." got hired on the spot... and got to work on lots of VS projects!
US readers might be interested to know that, while very offensive, the 'c word' is much, much less taboo in the UK. In fact, there's a well-established feminist movement to 'reclaim' the word.
I think there is a lot of culture behind the appropriateness of swearing.
I find Australian's are much more relaxed about it, than Americans. (purely anecdotal), but I don't think it can simply be categorised as being about 'status' or something else, it's dependent on the culture you are in.
i live in india and among people still closer to the culture, than the modern, savvy crowd... Recently i have found that i seem to swear as a tactic, when i find someone is not listening to my arguments, but just rejecting some of it implicitly...
"Whether you like to admit it or not, swearing is and will be taken as a sign of disrespect or superiority."
This completely depends on the culture as well as the situation obviously. I have always found that Americans make way too much of a deal of swearing.
You have to take an honest look at the world before you can optimize. A lot of our problems (in the US) come from trying to pretend we don't have social hierarchies, or problems with race, or whatever.
Some of your social superiors: your parents and older relatives, your SO's parents, your (company's) clients, a famous writer/athlete/musician you admire, the president of your country.
You probably don't treat them as equals, unless you have some sort of Asperger's.
FWIW: There's a pecking order on HN. And you're a member.
In any social setting, pecking order and stuff like that matters a whole lot to most people (and is very frequently the driving force behind a lot of the comments, even here). I try to treat everyone with respect regardless of who they are and I am disinclined to kowtow to anyone. I assure you it gets me in hot water on a routine basis with people who are trying to impose a hierarchy on the relationship and trying desperately to make sure they are in the superior position. Refusal to take the inferior position gets read by such people as an attempt to assert my superiority (and oppress them/disrespect them). It is damn difficult to convey equality to people hellbent on doing something like that. {Which makes me curious why you seem to experience it differently. :-)}
I refuse to kowtow also but rarely get into hot water. I'm curious what you're saying to these people. :-)
If someone does try to assert their superiority (I'm trying to think of an example, but am having a hard time) then I tend to appeal to their humanity and ask them to chill the fuck out.
(I don't know of a pecking order on HN. AFAIK you're all my equals. Even PG. He has more money than me, and has more relationships than me, is older as wiser than me, but I don't see him in any way to be my social superior.)
The pecking order here is far subtler than in a lot of places but it's there.
I'm some loud-mouthed brassy broad. If you are male, it's possible that's one reason you get less crap. I do things like sit up front in large meetings at work (because I can't see for crap and my hearing is not so good, etc) and it gets remarked on by other people like it's very aggressive Type A personality stuff. I don't do it to be assertive or anything but other people react like that's why I do things. I repeatedly run into situations where it feels to me as if acting like "everyone else" (or "just being myself") and also, oops, being female is interpreted as "feminazi" behavior.
Perhaps not the right (time and) place to make such remarks. In my defense: I'm short of sleep and working overtime this week.
Not saying they use that phrase. Just trying to give a shorthand way to express how other people routinely seem to view me. And one thing that seems to happen is that things I do for perfectly logical reasons (like sit up front because I don't see well) gets routinely interpreted as evidence of some kind of negative/socially unacceptable personality trait.
I don't think I am the only person people do this to. In fact, I think such erroneous attributions are the norm, not the exception. In my case, it frequently seems to get framed as "feminazi" or "dragon lady" or something along those lines -- ie some form of accusation that I am a woman who is aggressive to a socially unacceptable degree for a woman. I strongly suspect that many of the things I do which get negative reactions and chalked up to "ego" would be viewed as perfectly acceptable -- or even humble and self-effacing -- in a man.
Hired over a dozen engineers in the last couple years - swearing is a cultural signifier for me. It's a (small) cue that you might be a good team fit. If you say "fuck" while interviewing with me, I'm slightly more likely to hire you.
While I like your style, it's very hard to ascertain that swearing would be ok in an interview with you without some prior clue. Then again, I live in the States and most of my interviews that I've gone on were all corporate jobs.
I was in Germany a few years ago, and I remember a historian we were working with swearing a lot (in English) just to make points or convey extremities. When I queried him about it he said swearing didn't have particularly negative connotations when used in "normal conversation" in German. I took this at face value at the time, so I apologize if I've misspoken on the matter.
That sounds like a lame excuse. Maybe he was just unaware that he was swearing so much. I think it’s generally easier to swear in a second language: There are no parents around to tell you not to use certain words. I certainly don’t feel the same when swearing in English and German.
I almost never swear in German – written or spoken – because it feels wrong to me†. I have less problems swearing in English. This goes so far that I tend to say “fuck” to myself when something goes wrong and not the German equivalent (or if I do use a German word it’s the tame „verdammt“ – “damn”).
There is this comedy routine from 1998 by a German comedian about exactly this topic, by the way. I found it on YouTube, even with subtitles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxNLENPsbq4 (I’m not in any way claiming that it’s any good, it just fits so well.)
—
† I don’t have a problem with others swearing. I’m not offended by it.
German, as a language, is rather ill-suited to swearing. Other than "shit", there are no strong expletives I encounter. But lots of people say "fuck" (in English). I've often felt the need for a stronger expletive but there don't seem to be any. So I am sometimes reduced to swearing in one of the other languages I know. Finnish is best suited to the task, but pretty much any language seems to do better than German.
As I said in a recent post on exactly the same topic, if you think swearing is a sign of a poor vocabulary or linguistic skills, then you obviously haven't spent much time around linguists, speech pathologists, or english lit fans. These folk show just as much profanity, if not more, than the rest of the population.
As you show Fry says, 'loving language' and 'caring about what you say' has nothing to do with profanity.
I think it's particularly funny that the author spends an entire article deriding the use of 'fuck' and then intentionally uses it as a punchline. But hang on - even though you're going all 'meta' here - haven't you just spent a thousand words telling us that there are more professional ways to communicate, and you've just gone for your own self-defined cheap, lazy trick here? Whatever happened to leading by example?
Not for the supposed vulgarity, but for the lack of use of more interesting words.
It's like the rampant over-use of the word "awesome". Fine word, nothing wrong with using it, but using it as the adjective for everything indicates a lack of critical thinking skills.
I find the word 'fuck' plenty interesting. Also I hardly think, in the context of giving presentations/talks at conferences, that it is overused like 'awesome'.
In fact the presentation seemingly in question (the documentation one) only uses the word 'fuck' once (and 'shit' once) that I saw.
Honestly from my perspective the excessive talk of drinking and booze is much more worrying than some perceived overuse of a random English word.
If I have to deal with people using marketroid-style 'impact' when the correct word is 'affect', then others should just suck it up and not worry about 'fuck' being used as 'lack of verbiage'. 'Impact' in presentations needs to die (well, perhaps it can stay in physics or medicine presentations...)
How about the use of "impactful" ? (I swear by The Fates, the FSM's Noodly Appendage, and the Holy Handgrenade of Antioch that actual English speaking human beings used that word)
On the few occasions that I hear someone using the word "impactful", I'm tempted to ask "Do you mean 'effective'?"
Swearing is more a sign of laziness, than a sign of poor education. Speakers should consider the culture of their audiences and the atmosphere of the event before swearing. It just gives off an image that the speaker is self absorbed and not willing to adapt to a situation.
Honestly. If you stop listening because someone said a word you find distasteful, who is being lazy?
There's a point in your second sentence, but even that is a problematic statement. It's a very conformist attitude. Everyone generally wears a tie, so everyone should wear a tie, and anyone who doesn't wear a tie should be ignored. Willingness to adapt is closely related to a fear of standing out. I'd say: don't be afraid to stand out. It's okay to be different.
Perhaps not a poor vocabulary but at least a poor effort. I don't believe the poster was making the point that people who swear have a poor vocabulary anyway and in one of his examples he simply used the word 'gorgeous' instead of swearing. Gorgeous is hardly an advanced word.
I felt the point was spot on, which is that if you are going to use profanity in your presentation it is useful to 'think twice' which I read as, "Sit back and think about what you are trying to achieve by doing that." The OP gave some examples of reasons people might come up with; waking up the audience, setting the tone, Etc. In general there is a lot of difference between folks who do spend a bit of time thinking about their presentation and those who basically spin one off on the fly.
So if you're using profanity, and you think about why you chose to use profanity, and you agree with that choice then by all means go with it. However if you find that you're trying to bracket some key message that you really want your audience to go home with, then perhaps swearing isn't necessary. It can also be a lot less effective than you think.
Saying "Social media is so over" can be more effective at getting attention than "What the fuck is Social Media?" if the audience is invested in social media and have been defending it, as a concept/meme/market, with skeptical acquaintences.
I think one of the reasons that the author misses is that, as used by Zach Holman, 'fuck' levels the field between presenter and audience. "I'm not so important that I can't swear." It can be arrogant or overly formal to embrace how "gorgeous" your slides are, to emphasize how "gifted" you are at presenting. Instead, it emphasizes the fuckhead in all of us; the flaws, in order to say unequivocally "Yeah I'm an asshole sometimes, but here's what I think and I think it's worth hearing: I hope you do too."
Ok, I can see that, but I've seen folks who have tried and failed to make the audience think, that they themselves (the presenter) thought, of themselves (the presenter) as just another voice in the crowd.
In general if one is presenting and choosing to change one's vocabulary and speech habits in order to be less off putting to the audience, one risks coming off as insincere and condescending. Just like prose in the third person singular sounds presumptuous :-)
Presenting _is_ choosing to change one's vocabulary and speech habits, in order to bond with the audience. It's a matter of how good one is that determines whether a "fuck" is a fuck-up or a fuck-yes.
[eww, that parallelism felt forced, but I can't resist.]
A. Why have we editorialized in the title? If the author thought "Fucking Your Way Out" was an appropriate title, it should be the title here on HN, should it not?
(I don't think the title is appropriate or elegant, and maybe there's a meta-policy on HN to avoid putting "fuck" on the home page, which there are good reasons to avoid, having to do with brand and overzealous filtering software and whatnot. But I think it's kind of misleading, especially for an essay like this one, to advertise one title and put another one on the essay itself!)
B. If there is one fucking thing that will cause me to reconsider my personal policy of avoiding the use of the word "fuck" online, especially in public writing, it's the phrase "F-bomb", which is just fucking awful.
If you're trying to avoid the word for the sake of young children, or for the sake of avoiding the emotional impact of a real "fuck", you obviously need to say "effing" (in speech) or "fscking" (in print) or any of the hundred thousand other classic euphemisms, because "F-bomb" is not a substitute for "fuck". It just doesn't work, grammatically.
If, on the other hand, you're discussing the word from a literary standpoint, let me introduce you to a little concept called scare quotes: You can say "fuck" and not mean it! The safety is on!
I think my real problem with "F-bomb" may be that it's obviously a word for conducting a meta-discussion of the word "fuck" in front of young children. Perhaps my reaction would be much the same if you addressed me in baby talk and ended every sentence by patting me on the head. I'm not convinced that such a word needs to exist – If the audience doesn't understand "fuck" well enough to safely read it, why are you discussing the word? But when you absolutely need such a word, try the simple phrase "the F-word". You will sound like a schoolmarm, but then again it's not as if you were going to avoid that.
The HN title is ten times more descriptive than "Fucking Your Way Out." Nobody would have any idea what the article was about if he used that title, whereas his replacement title is succinct and accurate.
You can quibble about whether it should say "fuck" or "F-bomb", but it's up to the submitter's discretion to use a good title, and his chosen one is far better than leaving it as the default, so I'm not inclined to complain too loudly.
I also note that much of your ire should probably be directed at the author, who uses "F-bomb" as a euphemism many times in the article itself, and even heroically sneaks in the phrase "dropping some F-pepper" once (this is actually true.)
I'm quite fond of the term "F-bomb". It's an appropriate descriptor much of the time. A bomb produces a "sudden and violent release of energy", typically intended to destroy a target or to draw attention. Similarly, the word "fuck" is often used to intensify a destructive or dismissive sentiment, or to draw attention or produce shock. The emotional content the word "fuck" carries is (sometimes) the conversational analog to an explosive payload.
It's useful for meta-discussions even among people who are comfortable using the term "fuck", because it conveys information about the intent and effects of usage. Likewise, the term "F-Pepper" (used in the article) conveys additional information that the scare-quoted "fuck" would not. If I say a guy lobbed a couple F-grenades into a political discussion I was having with a friend, you can infer some things about his intent. Part of effective swearing is knowing whether you're dropping a bomb or some pepper, and part of effective meta-discussion is being able to describe those differently.
That said, I do find that some people use the term "F-bomb" in ridiculous ways. Similarly for S-bomb, C-bomb, B-bomb, and some others. Calling everything a bomb even if it has no bomb-like effects really cheapens the word and worsens the meta-discussion.
I should take down my whole complaint and replace it with this link.
(Tragically, one can no longer assume that I've seen anything, so thanks for the link. Whatever happened to the version of me that actually watched TV?)
I really find that it's all dependent on the context.
The use of profanity in a presentation (or the use of humorous images) can set the tone of the talk, and in a larger context, sets the tone for the event.
People have stated that profanity isn't appropriate in a "professional" context, and I think I agree with that. I don't use profanity around my clients, I wouldn't put it in a report, and if I wouldn't use it in a talk internally at my company.
I work at a "professional" company.
As an artifact of the industry I work in, however, I see a fair number of talks that aren't supposed to be part of a "professional" context. They're supposed to be part of a social context. In infosec, there's a continuum of "professionalism" in events which ranges from a bunch of folks in a bar giving talks while drinking to a conference like RSA.
For what it's worth, I get way more out of events like the former (although certainly not because of people swearing).
I think if you're giving a presentation at an event, you need to know what the context of the event is, and your presentation should match it.
I think the word "F-bomb" says a lot. To many, including I guess the OP, "fuck" is a "bomb", a word that rouses them from their slumber and causes them to say "OMG, did he just say 'fuck'". And while you still have this attitude, it's always going to be effective.
This "swearing isn't cool" attitude annoys me. It isn't cool, I agree. It's just neutral; for emphasis, like "very" or "awesome".
Get off your high horse. I'll say fuck if I please.
You can do what you wish, but be aware that when you say it, maybe YOU mean "very" or "awesome", but your listeners may hear something different. To me, the combination of a word that means sexual intercourse with a forceful tone of voice has a very unpleasant connotation of rape.
I can't keep you from saying it, but neither can you prevent that image from appearing in my mind when you say it. You're making a decision that a particular word choice is worth offending people.
In fact, I'd argue that you're choosing TO offend people. "Fuck" is an arbitrary syllable; you could just as easily say any other word. So your statement that "it's neutral" is not credible to me. If everyone DID get off their "high horse", if "fuck" became an everyday word on cereal boxes and in kindergarten classes, I bet you'd find a new word that sounded harsher, because it would no longer serve your purpose.
I'm not telling you what words to use, but I think your statement to "get off your high horse" is dishonest. You can't deliberately offend people and simultaneously ask them to stop being offended.
Your comparison to the word "very" is unintentionally apt. There's no reason to use the word "very." It's a weak word, and it signals that you just couldn't come up with anything more interesting to say.
So too with swearing just to get an audience's attention.
There's two orthogonal issues with "fuck". One is that it offends people. One is that it's kinda weak.
But the "weak" argument doesn't matter. I use weak words all the time. 95% of my words are weak. So why does it matter that I have another one?
I would say that it only matters if you buy into the first issue, that "fuck" is offensive. If you consider that fuck is just another word, then it doesn't matter that you're using yet another weak word.
Au contraire, the issue is exactly that the use of profanity is "weak" word choice. The article challenges those of us trying to create strong presentations to choose stronger words.
Why is it that if someone dislikes swearing in some regard they're considered to be on a high horse? It seems like having some view points simply isn't allowed . . which I usually find amusing as those who are against people with view points like this are usually in support of some modern, disruptive cause. ;)
It kind of reminds me of in high school where the kids who studying were told effectively to get off their high horses and the others would proudly proclaim they will not do their homework as they please.
Disliking another's way of speaking, regardless of profanity, is generally considered a high horse. Someone who doesn't like the way slumdwellers speak for example. Or someone who doesn't like the way folks trained with clear diction speak.
If you dislike the way a person communicates - not the content, but the method - then you're of the opinion there's a better way they should be talking. Hence: high horse.
I think those are different. I say "y'all" because I grew up in the southern US, and we recognize the need for a proper second-person plural here. Not everybody likes that word, but I'm not saying it in order to annoy them.
On the other hand, the very thing that DEFINES a swear word is that everyone knows that it's offensive. To choose a word BECAUSE it's offensive, then demand that people not be offended by it, is silly.
I think they're on a high horse because it's a word that hurts literally no one. I think it's fine to dislike it, be my guest. There's certainly words I don't use just because I'm not fond of them; but once you start telling OTHER people they can't use a harmless word that hurts absolutely no one because of some sort of "standard", well, that strikes me as quite a high horse indeed.
I don't get your point. You don't get to pick the language other people speak. "Fuck" is a word. It has meaning and connotation, just like other words. To most people, it does not mean "very" or "awesome", and if it did you'd see them use it that way.
Surely you choose your other words carefully, right? And you do them based on the definition that all of us English-speakers have agreed upon, right? Why should fuck be any different?
Basically, get your fucking attitude out of my language. I'll interpret the words the way I want to, based on my experience with other English-speakers; it's not my fault if you're an asshole about it.
I suspect you really wanted to post a diatribe about why profantiy shouldn't exist. If so, you need to go a whole lot deeper than "get off your high horse".
"You don't get to pick the language other people speak. "
And yet that's exactly what you've done, when you've decided the meaning of another person's speech.
You say that "it has a meaning and a connotation", but both the connotation and meaning depend on context and speaker (and also, as you've noted, on listener). It's simplistic to think that the only meaning of words is your interpretation. In a presentation, speaker and audience may interpret what the speaker said in different ways.
And your notion that "all of us English-speakers have agreed upon is laughable" - I would challenge you to visit a culture outside your own. Hell, just watch The Wire to see how wrong this idea is.
I'm not sure whether you noticed that "I'll interpret the words the way I want to" directly contradicts "You don't get to pick the language other people speak".
I wouldn't say that profanity shouldn't exist, merely that "fuck" in its modern usage is not profane. If you disagree, I'd challenge you to find a profane translation of "get your fucking attitude out of my language". It conveys aggression, but it's hardly profane.
Even if I leave out my personal opinion on the matter, this post didn't leave me scratching my head in a "wtf, is this real?" manner, but I find it insightful.
Personally, I use it fairly often since I talk like a sailor, but I wouldn't use it in a professional presentation because there's better ways to communicate ideas, to evoke emotion, and to engage the audience. You might not know what those ideas are, but to be a better speaker, you need to find out.
A couple years ago, I was studying sketch comedy writing at Second City (essentially the center of comedy, and where SNL, Daily Show, etc recruit from). As part of our last class, we had to put on a sketch show, and our teacher/director told us that we were allowed to use "fuck" once in our show, and this was a sketch comedy show ... the reason being, we had to find the one place where it be most effective and use it there. Every other place where we wanted to use, we had to find a better way to communicate our ideas.
And you know, we were better for it.
Using it in the title defeats the entire purpose of the word since everybody is already paying attention to you. "Fuck" is a draw word ... You need to find a better way to make them laugh and interested.
By "crutch," I assume you mean that it can be worked around, but it's easier for most people to use it. The words "I", "that" and "the" are also crutches in this sense. Arbitrary limitations can help you develop your creativity, but you shouldn't then conclude that the things arbitrarily disallowed are somehow bad in and of themselves.
As any good writing or speaking course will mention, swears are a literary crutch.
English especially is a wonderful langauge for wordplay. Like most langauges we have entire genres of humor based on how and which words are used.
Most of the swearing I see on the internet is simply a lazy stab at adding adjectives or getting a reaction. I feel the same way about the (over)use as John Hodgeman does about the word "meh."[1]
I think you gain an even greater disdain for swearing with the more critical literature you read. Reading Ebert's movie reviews or perhaps Gordon Ramsey's words, you realize they have a kind of eloquence that you don't often see in everyday speech. It is because they work at it, and refined writing is beautiful, but also because they take the time to avoid lazy crutches like swearing.
I've never quite understood this argument. Basically, and correct me if I'm wrong, you're saying that using a larger vocabulary is a good thing (and I agree), and yet you're suggesting banning words will somehow help you achieve a "larger" vocabulary.
Yeah I think this gets at a core problem of some curse words - the problem with words like "fuck" is that in the mind of the speaker, when agitated or lazy or both, the word often seems like a useful substitute almost anyplace in a sentence, and the word-search algorithm ends happily at that node very easily out of habit. To the listener, it's just noise and usually makes the speaker seem like an idiot.
This is certainly true. Fuck is not a bad word, and is a word I use with abandon. But it can't be the go-to largely because of its versatility. Overuse makes it less flavorful.
(I have had the privilege of working with some artists whose medium was profanity, and have been accused of it on occasion.)
I think he's referring to "eloquent swearing" - meaning that Ramsey doesn't just drop an F-bomb, he does it with style :). I've heard some great ones from him - once he described a burnt omelet (I think that's what it was) as "something that dropped out of my dog's fing a*hole". You can't help but laugh at that visual.
The exact argument against the use of profanity is that the omelet would be better described as "something that dropped out of my dog's dirty backside" or something similar. That is, there is no "eloquent swearing" exception. At all. Full Stop.
Holding that profanity can be used to positive effect in conveying passion and attitude is the precise argument against the "profanity is a crutch" crowd.
Completely agree here. Ramsey is about shock value - something that's incredibly cliche. You have to be damn good to be able to pull it off. 99% of the wannabe-dhh's out there aren't.
It was a poor choice, I really should have come up with a better second example - I've never seen any of his shows, only read his books. I was trying to think of a respected critic with mass-appeal.
The thing is, sometimes, instead of impressing people with their wit, some people just want to get to the point quickly. SAT words are great to know, and they have their place, but to use them in all contexts isn't always appropriate and is occasionally pretentious.
See, the thing about this comic is using profanity as a way to demonstrate non-conformance. But this does not seem to be the case here. Nobody here thinks that Zach is going to lose his job due to language.
What I see is the opposite, actually. I started watching Zach's video on the Play app, in which he drops a "play some fucking music" in there. I couldn't help but think "Aww, he thinks it's cute to talk like a brogrammer".
Put that together with the slide in his talk, and I can't stop having the impression that his use of language is more of an attempt to "sound cool" to his peers than to he actually "being himself".
It's the same as teenagers smoking due to peer-pressure.
The difference many people are missing is between moral offense and aesthetic offense. The author is claiming the latter; it's a critique of bad style. You can disbelieve the claim or disagree with it, but it's not prima facie nonsense.
It would be difficult for me to disagree more strongly with this article. To say that Zach is somehow lazy because he used a swear word is missing the forest for the trees. I have probably attended more than 50 conferences in the last few years and of the hundreds of talks I've seen, Zach obsesses over his presentations more than nearly anyone I've ever known.
The talk you pulled a single slide from, completely out of context, was simple, beautiful and useful - Readme Driven Development and TomDoc have been incredibly useful concepts driving productive development at GitHub and the talk was very effective in getting across what they are and why they are helpful.
The vast majority of conference talks are pretty awful. Often they are a handful of slides with little design or thought put into them, consisting of a generic Keynote or Powerpoint theme with a dozen slides with 6 bullet points on each one with the speaker simply reading them off. Or impossible to read code or any of another hundred horrible presentation mistakes. Many of them are boring, hard to follow and unfocused.
Zach, on the other hand, puts hours, often days, of work into each of his talks, focusing on making them simple, entertaining and useful to the audience. He uses jokes, like this, to keep the audience awake and paying attention - which given the way most conferences are set up, is necessary to keep people from checking their email during your talk. The amount of focus and attention that speakers like Zach pay to delivering their message is so much more respectful to the audience and the organizers than something mind-bogglingly unimportant like not swearing. Zach understands the majority of his audience, respects their time and tries to make his time in front of them worth it, and improves developers lives by effectively delivering information to them. This is more than I can say for more than half the speakers I've ever seen. To focus on Zach as a target because of using language that all of us use every fucking day is not only useless and mean, but harmful to the already difficult environment that is the technical conference world today.
Instead of the handful of people that might have been made slightly uncomfortable with language they probably use all the time, how about a blog post on the thousands of developers who are now more effective because of the actual content of his talks?
In the English language we have so many beautiful words we can use and most people seem to have limited vocabulary. Why should we be content with lower, near meaningless words when we can learn news words and use those effectively?
.. and what if people don't understand them? Use words appropriately with who you're talking to and consider what Handel said after the first performance of Messiah: “My lord, I should be sorry if I only entertained them; I wish to make them better.”
I can think of two well-known things I've seen in the blogosphere that use cursing heavily. The first is Mike Monteiro's "Fuck You, Pay Me." http://vimeo.com/22053820?utm_source=swissmiss I think in this situation the usage is appropriate and he used repetition of this phrase effectively throughout his presentation. The second isn't a presentation, it's an advice-giving website "Good Fucking Design Advice." http://www.goodfuckingdesignadvice.com/ To me it comes off as tactless and pretentious. I get that it's playing to the "frustrated designer" but this type repetitive usage is the type that washes out the meaning of a curse.
Personally I love cursing when it's appropriate. I go to a school where students and their teachers will often curse in front of eachother. It's never in aggression or anything, but the other day I came into class feeling ill and I was about to tell my teacher she asked, "feel like shit?" She knew a bug had been going around.
In my opinion, curses are indicative of someone's character. That's basically it. Use it in your presentation if you want to come off as a light-hearted extrovert not to be taken too seriously.
"Fuck" isn't cute or particularly clever, but like "bullshit" it does make for more effective communication in appropriate contexts.
Many years ago, one of mentors offered "You can't fuck scared and you can't sell broke," as the first rule of sales...and I only needed to hear it once for it to stick.
And at times the word "fuck" is a necessary component of the concept, e.g. nothing adequately describes fuck you money except "fuck you money."
This person believes that you should follow his rules.
This person believes that even if you clearly don't follow his rules, he will evaluate your content based on how much your behavior would indicate that you value you them if you did follow his rules. o_O
This person values presentation over content.
There are plenty of people on earth like this. Its good to know they exist. But lets not spend any more time discussing them.
I think HN's title here is more accurate than the actual article. Do not expunge "fuck", or any other word, from your vocabulary just because it can be misused. I can misuse many words just as easily as peppering "fuck" everywhere but he doesn't seem to be arguing to get rid of anything but swears.
If you're preparing a talk like that, you should be thinking twice about everything you prepare, though, not just "F-bombs". Did you put that "fuck" there to sound edgy? Unless you're presenting to a group of 12-year-olds nobody's going to think you're edgy.
On the other hand, I love to use "fuck" to establish tone. A few judicious and well-placed "fuck"s and you can easily establish that you're just like everyone else in the room and you're essentially just chatting rather than talking down at them or anything like that. Sure, if you banned yourself from using this word you could establish the same tone via a variety of methods but, sometimes, you just need to fucking cut through the bullshit and stop pussy-footing around.
There's also the aspect that, used well, using 'fuck' in a presentation helps to imply "I'm not selling you something here, making it sweeter than it actually is. I'm telling it like it is"
Swearing is the spice of language, some people like more spice, some people like less, some like their food bland. But there is a point at which the food just tastes salty, and most importantly you need a blend of spice to make things really shine, you can't just use salt and MSG.
If, as the author clearly states, its okay to use the word "fuck" in presentations then what's his problem with using it for dramatic effect in the lead? Where's a better opportunity?
The word "Fuck" is a dramatic word - it inherently conveys passion, I'd argue that Zach's use was the most appropriate use of the term (if you're going to use it at all).
I'd find this post more compelling if he just said "using profanity is the easy way out" instead of consistently trying to say "some profanity is okay, just not this usage".
Frankly, this is one of the things that really turned me off to Adeo Ressi, in his talks, presentations and classes he constantly drops F-bombs -- I assume to make him seem more hip/cool/grounded/whatever -- but it comes across as arrogant. However when I expressed this previously people disagreed... whatever. I dont think it makes you look cool.
I wish I could take a pill and have that word expunged from my own vocabulary though... I say it far too much in my private moments!
This is one of those issues in which I clearly see generational differences. I am pushing 40, and my opinions are at odds with most of the commenters.
In your personal language, your choice to curse or not is none of my business. But in the business world, it is unprofessional.
I won't think you are a bad person for cursing. But it will lose my respect. I will most likely stop taking you seriously. And the likelihood of my choosing to do business with you in the future is minimal.
> I'm not offended at the presence of the F-bomb, I'm offended that someone with his talent takes the easy way out.
I think the conversation would be more productive if we considered the language used when people respond to those who use profanity. Typically we're talking about being "offended" or "taken aback" (Scott Hanselman's post). From my trusty Apple dictionary I find that offense means "annoyance or resentment brought about by a perceived insult to or disregard for oneself or one's standards or principles".
So essentially this is a whole argument about annoyance caused by a choice of language. When it's said "I'm offended that someone with his talent takes the easy way out." it's further revealed that the annoyance is not coming from any high moral ground but is purely stylistic. All the talk about "do(ing) better" or cursing being a "crutch" is a red herring.
Further, this offense is caused by "disregard for oneself or one's standards or principles". It's rather arrogant to think that anyone should have any regard for your standards standards or principles at all. It's time to grow up and realize that getting upset by the particular style of another's words is a waste of your time and attention.
The real question here isn't whether the F-bomb is appropriate. Rather, it's how to balance entertainment and content in a technical presentation.
Zach's talk is memorable. People will remember him and talk to him afterward for sure. People will also think he's a strong presenter -- half of his jokes fell flat, but his confidence was impressive.
I do improv for fun at a "family" theatre in Hollywood. In my experience, skilled comedians use the "F-bomb" to convey character and to show they're "one of the guys," not as a shock word.
In this talk, rather than using shock words, Zach is filtering his content through a character -- an informal "brogrammer" who loves alcohol and swears on occasion. This is his ploy to entertain the audience while talking about a superficially-boring subject -- documentation.
Does it work? Well, perhaps Zach doesn't come off as an all-knowing expert. But, he does deliver a few messages in an entertaining fashion.
After all, would you rather have everyone agree you gave a "good" talk (and then forget about it, since there were so many "good" ones), or be a bit controversial and have a few people really take notice and love your point of view?
Yep, sure, lots of people will remember Zach and talk about him. It's too bad that they won't remember what he was talking about. When the presentation drowns out the content - assuming there was any content to begin with - that's a problem.
True, a lot of people get wrapped up in the presentation and are sparse on content, as I believe happened here.
However, the goal of these is often not to go in depth but to give your audience main points to remember. So, there is plenty of room to give an entertaining and contentful talk.
I am disappointed when people try to play it safe by avoiding humor or by hiding their personality. Making yourself relatable and engaging is important too!
I think it's a question of appropriateness. Cursing gets peoples' attention and stirs up powerful feelings and attitudes. Use a curse word at just the right time, and you turn a mediocre presentation into a good one. Or it can turn a good presentation into a fucking great presentation.
On the other hand, if you use profanity too fucking gratuitously, it will turn your presentation into a fucking piece of shit. Motherfuckers who aren't offended by it will learn to fucking tune that shit out and will be mildly pissed at you. The fucking douchebags that are offended by it will be, well, fucking offended by that shit.
In the case that the article mentions, my biggest reaction is a simple "Meh". I suppose a case could be made that it's a cheap shot aimed at getting peoples' attention, but ultimately, I don't feel like it was overdone. Nor do I feel it really helped a whole lot. I suppose if I were the presenter, I'd cut the "fuck" out for the simple reason that its use doesn't help my presentation out enough to justify having to hear people complain about it.
> I'm not offended at the presence of the F-bomb, I'm offended that someone with his talent takes the easy way out.
This is silly. It's like arguing "I have no problem with X, but ..." followed by things that you would never say if you in fact had no problem with X.
If the author had never been acculturated/trained to think that swearing was wrong, he wouldn't have written this post.
I.e. where are the blog posts on how you should think twice about using the word "goldfish" in a presentation? There aren't any because people really, truly, have no problem with the word "goldfish", unlike the word "fuck".
EDIT> If you want to argue against swearing in presentations, then do so. Don't pretend that you have no problem with swearing -- it just makes you look dishonest.
EDIT2> "acculturated" doesn't mean what I thought it meant. Substitute "trained"
If you want students in compulsory education (up to 16 in the UK) and in 'post compulsory College' (up to 18 here in the UK) to read any of your stuff at college, then you need to watch the language. Walled garden type systems block profanities.
Fsck could be used and would add a certain cachet...
Not sure about this one - I don't mind swearing if it's really rare and if someone wants to put something shocking on their slide because that's their style of bringing attention to some issues, then I'm completely fine with it. I know some people who happen to sometimes swear in emails, but knowing they'd do the same thing in person, it seems perfectly normal.
What really annoys me is "f^^k", "s^^t" and other "words" like that. If you don't normally swear, don't write it. If showing "fuck" on your slide makes you cringe, just skip it. It's neither natural nor needed. It's not censored - everyone knows exactly what it was supposed to say, but they also know you didn't actually want to write it.
See, that I don’t understand at all. To me “fk” and “fuck” are equivalent. If you want to use a word you should stand by it – it’s also typographically much nicer. “Fk” is a lazy cop-out. It doesn’t soften the blow, it only looks ugly.
"Fuck" seems like an excellent filter. It lets people who are more concerned with appearances and rules rather than content know that what I'm saying isn't something for them. That's ok, not everyone has to like what I say; the quicker they come to know that probably the better for both parties. The kind of person who could become offended by a simple word choice is just so different from me that I doubt we'd ever get along.
My second thought is that it also just seems like a more powerful form of the word "very" or "really" to me; only more fun. Like those words, if you overuse them it will get annoying, but otherwise I just don't fucking care.
It's a title slide, there isn't really space for actual clever word play. You can use some other single word for emphasis, you can make "important" even bigger, or I guess use some exclamation points, but those are kind of invisible. Or you can do with out any emphasis and just go with a affectless title slide. Whatever you go with, using 'fucking' only looks like a grammatical trick (or more of a trick than using 'extremely' say) if you do still cringe at the word or are still a little opposed to it.
I don't like swearing in presentations when the presenter is attempting to appear cooler then the audience they are addressing. These presentations tend to also be full of goofy pictures and lots of hyperbole and really turn me off.
On the other hand, when I'm sitting through a very technical talk and the engineer giving the presentation warns the audience about "wading through a lot of shit to get this feature working" I tend to take them seriously on that point.
Swearing says more about your abilities as a speaker then it does your content... that's the problem.
Oh, god, can we please stop repeating this fucking shite.
If you don't care enough to flex the language at your disposal, why should I give a fuck about what you have to say?
If your ability to perform rational thought is so bad that it thinks that sentence us logically sound, then you probably aren't going to be able to comprehend or use what I have to say.
"...Swearing says more about your abilities as a speaker then it does your content... that's the problem."
Good thing he is talking about speaking instead of writing.
EDIT: That is in the opening paragraph, and this is in the closing paragraph:
"...The minute you drop that F-bomb, that's when you lose me. If you don't care enough to flex the language at your disposal, why should I give a fuck about what you have to say?"
I feel that most occurrences of the word 'fuck' are unimaginative and fail to utilise the full expressive potential of swearing. There are countless interesting words and phrases that convey the same emotion as the F-bomb, and I would rather see more of those. I will not say that it's always inappropriate to use 'fuck' but it's certainly overused.
I have a tendency to swear like a sailor. I try to keep it "pg 13-ish" when posting online. It's against the rules to use profanity at work, so I work really hard at behaving there. But I still tend to swear too much around co-workers when not actually at work. SIGH. It annoys me. I think it makes a very bad impression.
The irony of writing long blog posts and HN comments about "unnecessary cursing" in a presentation (thereby linking to and discussing the presentation 10x more) is almost too much for me to bear.
Swearing should be a strength of your vocabulary and not a weakness. Occasionally it can be used to great effect, but hopefully is not relied on in general conversation.
Not all uses of the word troll are necessarily derogatory. In its high form, a troll (the article, not the person) should evoke and provoke discussion. The article is well written using the very vernacular of the subject piece. The article and its subject article form a nice meta-circular structure. Something, i'm sure can be appreciated on HN :-)
The article says that swearing is the easy way out, and that intelligent, talented people can do better. I'd go further and say that swearing nothing more than cheap fucking theatrics, and gimmicks.
As someone who spends her entire day writing and reading blog posts and has developed a love/hate relationship with blogging, I think "shut the blog up" is pretty satisfying and appropriate for Internet usage.
And this is but one, canonical example of the extraordinary linguistic versatility of fuck. I believe there's a whole literature on it.
And while we're on the subject, I believe there's even more literature on the fact that the distinction between swear words and ordinary words is deeply embedded in our language processing, such that swear words activate special emotional pathways. You literally can't get an innocent word like blog to elicit the same audience response as fuck... unless, presumably, you train an audience of babies, from the earliest stages of language acquisition, to think of blog as some kind of terrifying swear. Which will be hard to do. Babies are more difficult to fool than you'd think.
I don't understand why so many fucks have to fucking bitch so much about other people's fucking lexicon. Fuckers who get offended by fucking words are really sad. Well, mostly fucking immature. However, it is fucking sad when some fuckers can't bring proper attention to the fucking subject matter in a cogent fucking manner. Life is all about fucking balance.
