Profanity

There is a saying: “The absence of profanity will offend no one.”

This from the guy who signed his letters “Go fuck yourself” for a year. You might be surprised to learn that I don’t swear much, much less than I used to. There was a lot of swearing in the military, and there was a lot of swearing on Wall Street. I was a product of my environment. While at Lehman Brothers, I’m guessing I dropped about 100-300 F-bombs a day. I took it to another level. I would even drop the occasional C-bomb from time to time, which these days would get you escorted off the trading floor by security. I basically didn’t have a filter. It was George Carlin’s seven dirty words and then some.

Then, in 2010, I moved to South Carolina and I found myself saying fuck fuck fuck in mixed company, and people were giving me the hairy eyeball. It’s not that people in the South don’t swear, but they don’t do it in mixed company and they don’t do it unless they really mean it. Swearing is laziness—you can’t be bothered to think of a different, more appropriate word. So after living in hashtag #TheSouth for thirteen years, my language has improved dramatically. To the point that when I hear people dropping F-bombs all over the place, I actually find it offensive. A few years ago, my brother and I were at Prime 112 in Miami. There were a couple of NJ Guido guys at the next table that were using the F-bomb for about thirty percent of their words. F this, F that, F her, F that guy. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

To be clear, I’m not religious, and I don’t find swearing immoral, taking the Lord’s name in vain and all that. I just think it’s a bad habit, like chewing your fingernails, and the goal is to break bad habits, right? It’s a verbal crutch, an inappropriate form of punctuation.

Having said all that…

Nassim Taleb, who I met once twenty years ago, has said (paraphrasing) that swearing is a luxury of competent people. Here is a passage from Skin in the Game, which I don’t think he would mind if I shared it here because he tweeted it out in 2017:

Note the linguistic dimension—and why, in addition to sartorial considerations, traders needed to be put away from the rest of nonfree, nonrisktaking people. My days, nobody cursed in public except for gang members and those who wanted to signal that they were not slaves: traders cursed like sailors and I have kept the habit of strategic foul language, used only outside of my writings and family life. Those who use foul language on social networks (such as Twitter) are sending an expensive signal that they are free—and, ironically, competent. You don’t signal competence if you don’t take risks for it—there are few such low-risk strategies. So cursing today is a status symbol, just as oligarchs in Moscow wear blue jeans at special events to signal their power. Even in banks, traders were shown to customers on tours of the firm as you would with animals in a zoo and the sight of a trader cursing on a phone while in a shouting match with a broker is something that was part of the scenery.

I have had more than a few complaints about the language in these essays, which I mostly ignore. The profanity is not excessive, nor is it gratuitous. The use of strategically placed bad language is a good way to add emphasis to something without putting it in bold or italics. And as Nassim says, it is signaling—I am signaling that I am self-owned. You wouldn’t for example, see the head of research at some bank dropping F-bombs in his tweets, because he would get fired. He is not self-owned; he is owned by someone else. And while the head of research at some bank might get paid more than me, I have a freedom that cannot be bought at any price—to do and say as I please without the need to self-edit. Nassim also has this freedom. Few people do. It’s a bit like my essay on tattoos from earlier. Celebrities have tattoos, because they are signaling that they are self-owned. This is also true of gang members. And the foregoing is broadly true of foul language.

But a competing philosophy is that of politeness—that it’s simply bad manners to be swearing all the time. And the South has a monopoly on politeness. I have gone from swearing 1,000 times per week to swearing about 5-10 times per week, usually in these essays, as a point of journalistic freedom. And the upshot here is that profanity is good, if you use it sparingly, in strategic situations. In The Wolf of Wall Street, there were 600-odd F-bombs uttered in the movie, eclipsing the total of any other movie in history by a lot. If you’re swearing that much, the profanity loses its impact after a while and becomes meaningless, and gross. You’re just a caveman. I don’t want to be a caveman; I want to be a respected thinker. If the profanity in WGGTB was really gratuitous, a lot of people would get turned off by it and unsubscribe. It is a bit like taking vitamins. One a day is good for you, but the whole bottle will kill you. That is true of a lot of things, actually.

Some people use profanity to attack people they don’t like, especially on Twitter. I’ve found that has the opposite effect of what is intended. When you use profanity to attack someone, you’re actually strengthening the person you’re attacking. But if you attack someone in such a way that is so oblique, so high-level that people can barely detect your disdain, those are the most effective kinds of attacks. Throw a little humor in there, and it’s devastating. Go on Twitter and see what I mean. FirstNameBunchanumbers tweeting Fuck Biden! or Fuck Trump! doesn’t get far with his follower count. Someone with a rapier wit will, and they don’t do it by swearing. For a good example of this on the left, look at Andy Borowitz. For a bad example of this on the left, see Robert DeNiro.

Trump was really the first president to swear in public, though he didn’t do it much. I thought the whole thing about Hilary getting “schlonged” was fucking hilarious. And I didn’t mind the occasional Trump curse word, though as a general rule, I think that presidents should rise above that sort of thing. It’s just basic leadership skills. What I have always wondered is that presidents do in private. I’m not sure I would knowingly vote for someone with the knowledge that they chew out subordinates, dropping a bunch of F-bombs in the Oval Office. It’s just basic decency. Don’t get me wrong. It’s probably super frustrating to be president. You have all these things you want to do, and you have a bunch of dolts working for you. Even the leader of the free world must practice patience and tolerance.

So things will proceed as normal with my writing. Sorry, guys: there will be the occasional curse word. I don’t have a boss. I’m not responsible to anyone or anything. I can say whatever the f*** I want. But that power must be wielded responsibly, and with great care. And when you swear in writing or in public, it’s naturally exclusionary—not everyone appreciates it.

And one more thing: don’t swear in front of your kids. They will learn the words eventually; you don’t need to accelerate the process.