Watch your words
Profanity at work can hurt your reputation
The workplace can be a pretty civilized place but that doesn’t mean it’s safe from cursing, including the occasional outburst of the word. You know, “THE word. The big one, the queen mother of dirty words, the F-dash-dash-dash word,” as explained by adult Ralphie in “A Christmas Story.”
The word, Hannah Devlin says, that made her first day at work quite memorable. “I heard someone screaming it in their office, which was on the other side of the floor,” says the 25-year-old paralegal in Miami.
The part Devlin remembers most, though, is how blasé everyone treated the situation. “People didn’t even bat an eye. They didn’t laugh, they didn’t even smile,” she says. “They just went about their business. It was like they didn’t even care.”
In other words, it was acceptable behavior.
“People swear at work because they swear in real life,” says Mia Edwards, a family psychologist in San Francisco. “We’ve become more casual about most things, especially our language, and that impacts where we say what we say.”
New trend or nothing new?
Today, in our work-from-home environment, most people realize that they can turn the mic off when they feel an expletive-laced outburst brewing inside of them. Not that they come with much of a warning. Whether the cat knocked over your coffee, the doorbell won’t stop ringing or that co-worker who already annoys you is cutting you off every 30 seconds, profanity usually occurs when people are shocked or upset. But as people feel more comfortable working from home in their pajama pants, they also feel more comfortable dropping a few swears in what used to be casual — or business — conversations with others. “It’s a bad habit for me,” says Jonathon Minor, a 26-year-old accountant in Chicago. “Especially when I’m coming off a weekend and I’ve been swearing like crazy with my friends.”
In her book “Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing” (Oxford University Press, $14.95), Melissa Mohr writes “
… we’ve seen people use many different swear words to express the same things: aggression, insults, one-upmanship and denigration, certainly, but also love and friendship, and the surprisingness or awesomeness of our experiences. Swear words were and are perhaps the best words we have with which to communicate extremes of emotion both negative and positive”
So if we’re just communicating our emotions, what’s the problem? Well, says Rhonda Pruitt, swearing is no longer limited to communicating emotions. She says she understands when people express anger over a spilled cup of Starbucks with a rapid-fired outburst of swearwords. What she doesn’t get is the permeation of swearwords into the everyday workplace experience. “People swear when they’re giving a presentation, they swear when they’re talking about their weekends – it’s a constant,” says the 43-year-old physical therapist. “I hear some of my peers swear when they’re with their patients.”
Pruitt says she’s “a little old-school” when it comes to vocabulary. “I always thought it was a sign of a lack of intelligence when someone swore a lot,” she says. “It put you in a lower class.”
Erin Smith, a 41-year-old nurse in Des Moines, Iowa, says she and her co-workers use plenty of “colorful language,” as she puts it, when they’re on break or talking with each other away from patients. “It’s a way to be a little more descriptive when we talk,” she says. “I could say ‘I am so very tired,’ I guess, but there’s a better way to say it, and that’s the route I usually take.”
Smith says her patients aren’t too shy about using profanities, although usually not directed at her. “It’s more when they’re complaining about their pain or complaining about their kids,” Smith says. “Last year, we had a woman who had five adult children and she had a unique nickname for each one of them, like ‘so-and-so’ is coming today, but she’d use a much more aggressive name than ‘so-and-so.’ That used to crack me up.”
Be mindful of others
Jeremy Sanders, a social worker in New York who specializes in workplace communication, says that many of today’s younger workers are accustomed to swearing as a practice, especially those who are unfamiliar with a typical work setting. “They think they can bring their approach from college with them to the office and never really have given much thought to who it will offend and how it will impact others perception of them,” Sanders says. “I don’t want to sound like an old man yelling at kids on his lawn, but it is a generational thing. Today, people work from home, they work in shared workspaces. They don’t know much about office etiquette.”
Still, Sanders says, most people should have a basic understanding of family etiquette, which they can then apply to the office. “What they need to do is think of work as a huge family dinner, one with their parents, some aunts and uncles, their grandparents and some cousins,” he says. “There’s nothing too formal about those dinner but there is a sense of decorum. The conversation is casual and respectful. You wouldn’t drop F-bombs in front of grandma and grandpa at Thanksgiving.”
Don’t get too comfortable
Devlin, the Miami paralegal, think the occasional use of profanity can unite workers across generations. “I think it’s a great ice-breaker between the 20-somethings and the 50-somethings. A couple of the attorneys talk to us like they’re talking to their friends. I mean, they don’t say anything abusive and they probably watch what they say but they’ve always made us feel like we’re part of their group,” she says.
Although it’s admirable to make new coworkers feel welcome, it’s also important to make sure they feel comfortable. “People say they can read people’s reactions and then speak accordingly but that’s not the case,” Lindberg says. “It’s hard to have a shifting approach to the language you use at work. It’s a lot easier to be cautious with what you say. Save your more colorful language for the people you’re most comfortable with when you’re out of the office.”