Swearing Is Good for You

by Emma Byrne

  Like me, Barbara used to work in IT before leaving to become a university lecturer. “My husband’s still in that industry so that keeps my connection pretty live. [Also] I’ve got two brothers in the industry so we’re kind of an IT geek family.” So the types of jocular abuse (piss-taking in the UK) she encountered came as no surprise—to her or to me. What is surprising is the degree of nuance that goes into telling someone to fuck off.

  Barbara interviewed and observed a mix of men and women at three small IT companies in New Zealand and almost all of them said that they’d taken the piss (and had the piss taken out of them) at work. In fact, piss-taking is a matter of pride and—male or female—most employees were insistent that they were “included” in banter and that they gave as good as they got.

  In the three months of observation that Barbara carried out she discovered many things. Firstly, “piss-taking”—whether it involves swearing or not—is really important for team bonding and morale. The most common piss-takes were all ways of bringing the team closer. The employees of these three companies only insulted the people they knew and got along well with. Being initiated into the banter was a sign of finally being accepted. Whenever someone new arrived, insults would start off gently then ramp up as the team tested to see whether the new person could take a joke.

  Barbara does note one startling (for the newcomer at least) exception to the rule. The self-appointed workplace joker “terrorized” a new male employee by inviting him to a game of “all-male nudie leapfrog” being held at lunchtime.

  “God I remember that,” she says amid gales of laughter, “All-boy nudie leapfrog!” Was the new guy really that terrified? Apparently, he left the company not long after. “That’s very Freudian, actually. That’s what Freud said—we put things in a joke to protect ourselves and then we can say the unsayable—I love that stuff.”

  Piss-taking, swearing, and jocular abuse allow people to talk about things like race, sex, and other types of difference in a way that is—or at least can be—a sign of solidarity. Alpha Tech has about fifteen employees in New Zealand, but it’s part of a much larger international IT group. Barbara was sitting in on a Monday morning teleconference.

  “It was just the general banter going on—I was one of the gang by then—we were sitting round the tables and, you know how the technology always takes a while to fire up . . .”

  One of the employees, Kara, decided she’d had enough of the men always running the videoconferencing equipment and snatched up the remote control. Alf, one of her colleagues, started calling Kara the “evil, remote-control woman.” Far from being offended, Kara reacted with glee, taking it as a sign of recognition that she’d wrested control over the equipment from the men. As a woman in a male-dominated profession, that kind of joshing is a sign of acceptance, of finally becoming one of the guys.

  Did that happen to Barbara? And, as a scientist, would she give as good as she’d got? Not quite, she says, but it’s a fine balance she had to achieve.

  She described how hard this could be:

  If you sit back and are removed from it, playing the objective researcher role, you kill the humor. You’ve got to just loosen up and gently become part of it without being the initiator . . . You end up having to use a bit of the language in the right situations. If someone played a prank on you the standard reply was “fuck off”—you had to respond with that or you were just a patsy, really!

  Even when it doesn’t explicitly involve swearing, jocular abuse (or, less technically, “piss-taking”) hits a lot of the same spots as bad language. Usually, piss-taking involves a taboo, or at least some topic that the piss-takee might be expected to find sensitive. That’s why height jokes tend to be aimed at the short (or the extremely tall). Piss-taking is also designed to get an emotional response out of the hearer. While I can’t find any studies on the effect of piss-taking on heart rate and galvanic skin response, it’s my intuition that, along with the laughter, the piss-takee (and probably the piss-taker and bystanders) experience quite a bit of emotional arousal. As with jocular swearing, piss-taking requires a lot of trust and bonding in order to be sure that it’s going to go over well.

  What the researchers in Barbara’s team found is that it all comes down to relationships:

  [Piss-taking] is such a relational device between people that if the relationship is OK you know what you can get away with, which boundaries you can cross and which ones you can’t. It’s not really predicated on race or gender or that sort of thing—it all comes down to how well people know each other.

  A lot of the jokes involved swearing or at the very least they challenged taboos. “Many of the jokes are outright racist, sexist, or otherwise personal.” Fale, a Samoan New Zealander, talks about her European New Zealander colleague whom she calls an “FOB” (fresh off the boat). “I make English jokes about him and call him ‘fat boy.’ Everyone laughs.” Doesn’t it bother Fale? Apparently not. In an interview with Barbara she laughed and said that it was “fun” and that she “gave as good as she got.”

  Of all the insults and jokes that Barbara observed, very few seemed to overstep people’s boundaries. Some people were never teased about their weight, for example. Barbara noticed that “fat jokes” were leveled only at people who made the same joke about either themselves or others. The backslapping, laughter, and smiles that went with these jokes meant that they didn’t appear to cause offense. In order to come off well, jocular abuse either has to stay within the boundaries that people set for themselves by making their own self-deprecating jokes first, or it has to be so outrageous that it can’t possibly be meant seriously.

  Barbara had expected that jibes about race, sex, and all the other modern taboos that come under the umbrella of political correctness would be treated with extreme caution but instead the insults were raucous, risqué, and reciprocal. There’s an odd effect at play with some of these racial insults—at least in theory. Research conducted in the 1970s suggests that the more outrageous the insult the more intuitively it is construed as a joke, whereas milder insults are more likely to be heard as “meant.” The incongruity, that “gasp” moment between the leveling of the insult and the joke being accepted as such, is very much like our responses to swearing. The response is the emotional followed by the intellectual. The picture is even more complicated because so many joking insults include swearing and the bigger and bolder the broken taboo, the higher the stakes but the bigger the joke.

  The Banter Backlash

  That’s not a message that’s welcomed by writer and motivational speaker James V. O’Connor. In 1998 he began a one-man crusade to cure American workplaces of the vice of swearing when he founded the Cuss Control Academy of Northbrook, Illinois.2 For a payment of $1,500 an hour to his organization, Mr. O’Connor will bring his brand of “humor and overlooked common sense” to your organization. He operates from a leafy suburb on the edge of Lake Michigan. His home office lies in a triangle bounded by a nature preserve and not one but two adjoining golf courses—there’s a certain defiant gentility to both the place and his manner. In his measured and slightly folksy way, Mr. O’Connor talks proudly of the corporations, societies, and schools that he’s visited in order to purge profanity.

  “Some companies hired me because there was a real problem with swearing in the company and they didn’t want to single anybody out, so they just had me come in and do a presentation to the entire staff.” American audiences really enjoyed being taught not to swear, he says.* I try not to sound too skeptical when I ask if that even includes the high-school kids.

  “Oh yeah!” he says, proudly. “I spoke at a lot of high schools. I made it funny. In one school I got a standing ovation—2,000 students gave me a standing ovation.”

  Getting 2,000 hormonal teenagers to appreciate anything, let alone being instructed not to swear, seems little short of miraculous. How does he manage to get kids that excited about clean language?

  What I do is I say to kids: whenever you’re mad you’
re either . . . [at this point he pauses, and seems to handle the next few words with rubber gloves] You’re either “pissed off” or “fucking pissed off”; there’s nothing in between. Think of other words that you could use. They came up with “mad,” “outraged,” “upset,” “livid,” “furious,” “perturbed” . . . I said, if you say to your friend “I’m really perturbed” he’ll probably laugh because it’s kind of a funny word. But if you say “I’m really upset” he’ll probably be more interested in hearing what your problem is than if you say you’re “effing pee owed.”

  It sounds like a fair point—I personally think “perturbed” is a fantastic word—but I’m still not quite getting the standing ovation. I ask him why there’s such an appetite for self-improvement via swearing elimination in the States. A hangover from their Puritan forebears, perhaps? According to Mr. O’Connor the cause is much more recent than that. He believes that swearing is a modern ill.

  “It’s part of our casual society: casual clothes, casual sex, casual relationships with people who used to be called Mr. and. Mrs. In the past you never called the boss by his first name.” Mr. O’Connor (not James; definitely not James) warms to his down-home, common-sense oration. “The 1950s and ’60s were very formal and rigid, but along came the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, women’s liberation; a whole lot of things going on to make people feel more free to be who they wanted to be.”

  Mr. O’Connor thinks that things also changed when women entered the workplace. Decades ago, he says, if men swore at all they certainly didn’t swear in front of women. But then women made it into the workplace, “and they had to be one of the guys; they had to act like men, dress like men, wear suits and everything else, and try to talk tough, and they thought that had to include swearing.”

  Is this what the fight against swearing comes down to? A nostalgia for a simpler, happier time? There are so many questions that I want to ask him about the points he’s just made, but his courteous certainty makes me lose my nerve. I thank him, wish him all the best, and scurry back to the twenty-first century, where the language might be casual but at least I get to wear trousers if I want to.

  Some might yearn for a golden age of clean language (which, as we’ll see in the next chapter, probably never existed), but what about life in real twenty-first-century workplaces, where women and men from different cultural backgrounds work together? Well, thanks to Professor Janet Holmes and her colleagues from the Language in the Workplace Project at the Victoria University of Wellington, we don’t have to guess.

  An Appreciative Inquiry into Swearing

  Professor Holmes is a well-spoken New Zealander with a passion for understanding how people communicate. Rather than deciding how people in workplaces should talk, she set out to study how they do talk. Her team goes into factories and offices to see how humor, small talk, and swearing play a role in the work environment. “Our team’s approach is what’s called an ‘appreciative inquiry.’ We look for what people are doing well. We were called in by [one company’s] HR people because they had this particularly high performing team and they wanted to know what made it work.”

  This team of sixteen men and four women—nicknamed the “Power Rangers”—is a tight-knit group of Samoan, Maori, Tongan, and European New Zealanders. They agreed to carry voice recorders around for a week. The swearing just jumped out of the transcripts, says Janet.

  To an outsider, all this swearing might seem off-putting —as though the Power Rangers are a really hostile bunch of people. But again, Janet stresses that there is a nuance to swearing that is extremely important. Thankfully, she is willing to demonstrate the different uses of the word “fucking” in the way that only a professor of linguistics can:

  Generally speaking swearing has a number of different functions. One is to just emphasize what you’re saying; it can act like any intensifier, like “really” or “very.” But “fucking” is used so regularly in this particular context that it’s part of the jargon of the group. You can tell from the way they pronounce it whether it’s likely to be aggressive or whether it’s just an intensifier. Often it’s to do with the volume and the stress like, “not fucking likely” as opposed to “not FUCKING likely.”

  I can really hear the difference. Possibly her colleagues in the adjacent office can, too. “Y’know,” she reflects, as I hold my breath and wait for someone to knock on her door to check whether everything is OK, “the louder it gets, the more of a signal it is that the person is actually annoyed as opposed to using it just to take it up a notch.”

  The paper that she and her colleagues published in 2004 contains no shortage of swear words.3 Mr. O’Connor would be mortified. But all that swearing kept the team bonded, particularly when it came to whinges or complaints.

  If whinges and complaints sound like the same thing to you, then you’re not a professor of linguistics. Janet explains the difference: a whinge is the kind of grumbling that you indulge in when you don’t expect anything to change (“fuck this shitty weather”) whereas a complaint is a grumble with an implicit request for change (“I wish people would stop trailing their wet umbrellas all over the fucking floor”). Complaints, she explains, are a “face-threatening act.”

  That sounds pretty violent, but actually a “face threat” is entirely metaphorical. Anything that might cause someone to “lose face” is technically a face-threatening act, so complaining about work or questioning someone’s competence is a face threat.

  Take this exchange between Russell,† a Samoan-European in his late twenties and Lesia, a Samoan in his early thirties:

  “[I’m] fucking sick of this line,” says Russell to Lesia. “Stuck here all the time.”

  “If I put you on that line you’re getting worse,” Lesia replies. “Fucking worse . . . Slow like an old man.”

  To me that sounds like fighting talk. But again my instincts are wrong. Janet’s data show that the insults and swearing are the oil that greases the Power Rangers’ wheels. “It’s very friendly. It’s not a bitter complaint. [We found] that swearing was clearly one of the ways in which they expressed solidarity with each other and that they got on well.”

  Swearing for solidarity is something that Ginette, the Power Rangers’ team leader, does very well. Although she’s responsible for making sure the Power Rangers work together as a tight unit, she’s very much “first among equals.” Much of her time is spent dealing with whinges and complaints like these. But Ginette has a secret weapon: she’s an expert in understanding how and when to use swearing.

  Janet becomes animated, obviously remembering Ginette with fondness:

  Ginette speaks fluent Samoan. One of the interesting things about her was that, at the team meeting at 6 a.m. every day, Ginette was very direct and used really “in yer face” language. She would lambast them if they hadn’t achieved yesterday’s objectives; tell them they had to do better today. But afterwards, when she went around and talked to the team members one by one, she was much more motherly. She even used Samoan to the Samoan speakers to check that they’d actually understood everything and were on board.

  On the rare occasions when the Power Rangers did fuck up, Ginette would tell them to their faces. But she would also defend them elsewhere in the company using language that was much more polite and diplomatic. Ginette sounds very fluent—not just in English and Samoan but in swearing and not swearing as well.

  In fact, Ginette sounds like the kind of woman in the workplace who would give Mr. O’Connor a fit of the vapors. According to Janet, however, she is an extremely astute communicator—and the swearing is just part of that. “As most people do—depending on who they’re talking to and in what context—she changed her style. So she was very abrupt and direct, and she could abuse people if they shouted comments to her in the morning meeting, but then afterwards, one-on-one, she was much more jokey and sympathetic.”

  Swearing in the Power Rangers team is obviously full of nuance. What would happen if a newcomer tried this
? If I joined the Power Rangers tomorrow, would I have to start swearing straightaway? To my delight, Janet has looked at this problem, too, studying the experience of immigrants who have recently arrived in New Zealand. The important thing is to prepare newcomers so they don’t get a shock, she says:

  It’s one of the things we thought about quite a lot because we’re working with migrants who were coming to work in factories and construction sites—that’s the other place where we found a lot of swearing, on building sites [to the surprise of no one at all], and so we take the view that you should warn them that they’re going to hear this language.

  Many new arrivals find it shocking to hear this kind of language in their workplace. It’s not that they’d never swear, but many migrants come from cultures where swearing almost always has negative connotations. In that case it can be hard to get used to your colleagues doing it. And, as we’ve seen, even if swearing isn’t necessarily thought of as vulgar by default, what counts as an unforgivable insult in one culture might be laughable in another. Getting the level of offense right is a tricky business:

  The first thing is just to say: don’t react negatively to this. Um, and . . . [Janet pauses, choosing her words with care] there’s no requirement that they use it—but if they want to be integrated into the team it’s gonna take them longer if they resist using the language themselves. I’d say: if you can use this sort of language yourself comfortably then fine, but otherwise just wait until you feel you can do it. You’re not likely to be able to change the workplace if you’re a lone voice among a whole group who have developed their own ways of talking.

  Brits and Kiwis have much in common when it comes to swearing at work, but the transition, even for a native-born Brit, can be a difficult one to navigate. Take the case of British researcher Stuart Jenkins who found exactly that when he went to work in a mail-order packing warehouse in East Anglia to help pay for his studies. The line Stuart worked on didn’t have a Ginette to help gel the team together. Instead, the informal leader on the floor was “Ernest”—a large and boisterous chap who enjoyed making temps in general and students in particular as miserable as possible, tripping and “play-punching” them in the stomach. After a couple of months of this treatment, Stuart had had enough.