F*CK! Swearing Has Changed

There was a time when dropping a well-placed expletive in a business meeting carried genuine power. It was a signal. “I am real, not performative.” 

I had a friend who said, “whoever swears first in a meeting wins.” Why? It communicated confidence, a certain ease with authority, and a willingness to cut through the formality that separates people who are actually talking from people who are just exchanging approved words. It took a little bit of bravery.

That time has largely passed. And like a lot of things, we can blame Donald Trump.

Ok, it may not be entirely Trump’s fault but he has certainly played a factor.

The strategic use of swearing in professional settings was always premised on transgression. Swearing worked because it violated an expectation. You were in a boardroom, or on a client call, or in a hallway conversation with someone you wanted to read as a peer rather than a subordinate, and you said the thing you weren't supposed to say. The jolt of that minor rule-breaking was the point. It said: we're past the pleasantries, we can be real here. It functioned as a trust signal disguised as a stumble.

Transgression Requires a Norm

But transgression requires a norm to transgress. And that norm has quietly dissolved.

Look no further than our current Trumpian era of politics, where profanity has gone almost entirely mainstream. “Open the f*ckin’ strait” is only one of the most recent Trump f-bombs. That was a word that previous presidents never said, at least publicly.

Contrast our current, somewhat bewildering timeline to 1971, when Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau was caught on camera apparently mouthing the f-word at opposition members across the floor of the House of Commons. When pressed, he denied it with magnificent audacity, claiming he had said "fuddle duddle." The country debated lip-reading for weeks. The episode became one of the most famous moments in Canadian parliamentary history, not because Trudeau swore, but because swearing in that setting was genuinely shocking. It was a transgression with real cultural weight, the kind of moment that could define a political career, which is precisely why Trudeau spent so much energy denying it.

That was the world in which profanity still had power.

Fast forward fifty years and the contrast is almost comic. Donald Trump has made coarse language a signature of his brand, dropping expletives at rallies and in interviews with a regularity that stopped registering as remarkable years ago. 

The contrast between Pierre Trudeau's "fuddle duddle" scandal and the Trump era tells you almost everything you need to know about how much has changed. In 1971, a politician had to invent a fake phrase to escape the consequences of a single apparent swear word, mouthed silently across a legislative chamber. Today, politicians deploy profanity freely at public rallies and social media posts and the news cycle barely notices. The transgression that once required a cover story now requires no explanation at all.

Swearing Lands Flat

When something gets adopted at that scale, it stops being transgressive. It becomes wallpaper.

And what happens in politics filters into culture broadly. If the leader of the free world can say it at a campaign rally and nobody blinks, it is very hard to argue that the word retains any particular power in your quarterly planning session.

Into this environment, casual swearing lands flat. Not because it offends, though it certainly still can, but because it no longer surprises. If everyone's talking the same way at the company all-hands that they talk at the pub, profanity doesn't signal rule-breaking.

Now swearing in a business setting is just…coarse.

The ice-breaker function depends entirely on asymmetry. When norms were rigid and professional language was stiff, a single well-chosen vulgarity cut through all of that. It created a moment. Now that professional language is already quite loose, there is nothing to cut through. 

You are not breaking the ice so much as confirming the water was already liquid.

All Downside

What remains is almost all downside, the real and continuing possibility that it will land wrong. Not everyone has loosened up at the same pace or in the same directions. Generational differences matter. Industry differences matter. A word that reads as authentic in a creative agency can read as aggressive in a financial services firm. The demographic composition of the room matters in ways that are genuinely complex and easy to misread. Someone in the meeting may have already formed an unfavorable impression of you, and the expletive will simply confirm it. All of this existed before, of course, but the calculation used to be that a successful deployment was worth the risk. Now, when the ceiling of the upside is so much lower, the math no longer works.

This does not mean swearing has no place in professional life. Unplanned, contextually honest expletives, the kind that escape when something genuinely goes sideways, still register as real. They work because they are not strategic. The moment you are reaching for the word as a tactic, you have already lost the quality that made the tactic work.

The underlying desire is reasonable. You want to move past the performance of professionalism and into actual conversation. You want to signal that you see the other person as a peer. That is a good instinct. It just needs a better vehicle.

The word itself was never the point. It was always a shortcut to authenticity. The shortcut is closed. 

Take the longer road.