Think twice about that F-bomb in your next talk

"There used to be mad, silly, prissy people who used to say swearing was a sign of a poor vocabulary. Such utter nonsense."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_osQvkeNRM

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

[1]: http://waxy.org/2009/02/john_hodgman_on_meh/

And to paraphrase Isaac Asimov: Profanity is the first refuge of the insufficiently eloquent.

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.”

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.

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 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.

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.

Swearing is an art, not a science.

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".

http://weblog.muledesign.com/2011/04/creative_mornings.php

It's the one time I've seen it work well.

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!

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 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.

What the fuck is all this fuss about?

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?

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.

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...

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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?"

Irony? :-) (replace say with write)

My advice: Do what you want, but recognize you're subject to the rules of the above, and interpretation can vary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7PJ1oeEyGg

Dad 1987