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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.

Investigate a crime scene only using the word fuck http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQbsnSVM1zM (The Wire)

> 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?

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ7z5CUsrbk

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McClane#Reception

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.

I've found anecdotally that acceptance of that word in a professional environment is limited to the two tails of the income distribution.

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.

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!

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.

"Social superiors"? Man. There's just so much wrong with that...

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.

Educate me some more and please name a social hierarchy I belong to. I'm a pretty standard geek so feel free to make assumptions.

I really want to know who my superiors are so I can call them up and apologize for treating them as equals all these years.

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.

Peace.

aggressive Type A personality?? Damn... pop psychology books.. Current cognitive science has long discarded that as a inaccurate model...

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.

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.

Not only would I drop the F-bomb in the presence of the new boss, I dropped it at my interview. And I got the fucking job.

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.

> Whether you like to admit it or not, swearing is and will be taken as a sign of disrespect or superiority

and

> Swearing is absolutely a status strategy, even when speaking to groups.

The "clueless" according to the Gervais Principle (http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...) are the usual suspects in this (yes based on some anecdotal evidence).

EDIT: formatting.

I would agree with you if we're considering English. I'm not sure the same conclusions can be drawn for other languages (German springs to mind).

Why?

I’m German and that seems bizarre to me. Swearing is definitely not used independently of context in German.

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.

"Swearing is absolutely a status strategy"

Not always, but it risks being perceived as such, which is why it's a problem.