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Work

Fuck at work

In some workplaces the word is the sound of the job being done. In others it is a disciplinary matter. The difficult part is that the same word, in the same building, can be both.

Where it is the norm

Professional kitchens run on it, and Gordon Ramsay made a television career out of showing that they do. Trading floors always have: Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker (1989) recorded the word as the working language of Salomon Brothers, and The Wolf of Wall Street is a film about it. Building sites, warehouses, newsrooms, operating theatres, oil rigs, fishing boats, police stations and the armed forces all use it freely, and in each the word does a job. It marks that people are among equals, it lets off steam in high-pressure work, and it signals that the speaker is not managing you. Yehuda Baruch and Stuart Jenkins, in a 2007 study of a British workplace, found that swearing among colleagues built solidarity and relieved stress, and that banning it would have damaged morale; they recommended that managers tolerate it among peers and object only when it is aimed at someone.

Where it is not

Aimed upward, at customers, in writing, or in a room where not everyone has agreed to it, the word changes meaning. It reads as loss of control, contempt or a threat. British employment tribunals have upheld dismissals for calling a manager a fucking this-or-that, for swearing at a customer, and for a single email, and they have found dismissals unfair where the word was the ordinary currency of the workplace and an employer suddenly objected to one instance. The consistent thread in the case law is context: what the culture was, who the word was aimed at, and whether the employer applied the rule to everyone. Written channels are worst. Tone does not travel in Slack, and a screenshot lasts for ever.

The boardroom

Chief executives use the word as a display of authenticity, and it makes headlines. Michael O'Leary of Ryanair has sworn at press conferences for twenty years as a deliberate brand. Elon Musk told advertisers who had left X to "go fuck yourself" on stage at the New York Times DealBook summit in November 2023, and the phrase became the story of the event. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison all had documented reputations for it. The effect depends entirely on power: a chief executive who swears is "passionate"; a junior employee who does the same is "unprofessional". The word has not changed. The permission has.

FuckUp Nights

In 2012 a group of friends in Mexico City started an evening at which entrepreneurs told the stories of their business failures. FuckUp Nights is now a franchise in over 300 cities, with a research arm called the Failure Institute, and it is a useful example of the word doing something a polite word could not: "Failure Nights" would have no audience.

A working rule