tiny gigantic

I’ve often been in meetings or work sessions with clients and collaborators, said the word “fuck” (or one of its many useful variations), and felt an almost imperceptible tremor crawl through the room. And it often happens that after the meeting—with the clients all happy and shook up—one of my collaborators will sidle up to me and say, “You were really amazing. Except for the swearing.”

Give me a fucking break.

See, there’s gratuitous swearing, and then there’s using powerful language for a purpose. There’s the the language of the establishment, and there’s the language of humans. You tell me: which one can be understood by everyone?

Typical meetings (even the brainstorming kind) often spawn a near-comatose state and a reduced desire to participate. A stuffy, semi-gloss room, whiteboards with boring pie charts on them, powerpoint projections, a polycom, and an agenda: it’s no wonder people go numb.

But curse words signal to people that something different is happening, or is about to happen. They make people pay closer attention. They signal comfort and freedom of expression, which is what’s necessary to make others comfortable and more likely to say what they think.

From NYT:

…cursing calls on the thinking and feeling pathways of the brain in roughly equal measure and with handily assessable fervor…Other investigators have examined the physiology of cursing, how our senses and reflexes react to the sound or sight of an obscene word. They have determined that hearing a curse elicits a literal rise out of people. When electrodermal wires are placed on people’s arms and fingertips to study their skin conductance patterns and the subjects then hear a few obscenities spoken clearly and firmly, participants show signs of instant arousal.

Curse words will always be some of language’s most powerful tools. So it makes sense to figure out how to use them to your advantage. This is not to say you should swear at people (though you might feel compelled to) simply because they’ve gone glassy-eyed and drooling while you talk. Instead, think about talking like a human, rather than a machine. Think about using curse words to get people engaged, and to add emphasis where it’s needed. And of course, make sure that what you’re saying really matters, with or without the swearing.

03/12/07 by josh kamler

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 11:24 am and is filed under Thinking, Wordplay. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.