Is it all right to swear on the job?

During my first weeks on the job in a brief and non-illustrious stint as a communicator some years ago, I forgot to pull the trigger on a scheduled press release.

An senior executive from our company phoned me from his office down the hall and set my ear ringing with shouted rebukes. Yet when I hung up, all I recalled were the F-bombs—not anything he might have wanted me to do next.

Did I understand that I’d blown it? Oh, you bet. Was the profanity effective? Your call.

That’s the thing about swearing at work—or, less often, in written communications. It might just be counterproductive. For some (especially younger workers) curses are as unremarkable as dropping a “you know” into a sentence. Others find it distracting or off-putting.

Overlapping the two are those who distinguish between cursing at someone, and the overexcited co-worker who slips into profanity when regaling the lunchroom with the time he was hiking in Oregon and came face to face with a f—ing Sasquatch.

So is cursing a good idea at work, or not?

Preserving workplace decorum