Welcome to the @#$1@!4 newsroom

Reminds me of a passage from (I think) Ron Luciano's book.

He's behind the plate and Princeton man Lou Pinella is at the plate. Ron calls a marginal strike and Lou growls at him, "Where's it at?"

Thinking he had Lou trapped, Ron said "Shouldn't a Princeton man know better than to end a sentence with a preposition?"

Pinella stepped out, thought about it a minute and said, "Where's it at, cocksucker?"

 

My grandmother, 82, uses "shootfire" as her hardest expletive. (What she really wants to say, and Joe Schultz would agree, is "shitfuck." Or, occasionally, "fuckshit.") ... She is expressing the same sentiment as I am when I let out a good, hard "fuck!" Why is my preferred word considered profanity while hers is not? We are communicating the same expression and mean the same thing.

 

Nothing beats hearing an agitated Religion Editor in her 70s muttering "shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit ..." when something's not working the way it's supposed to.

I've been at two places where the Religion Editor also was known to invoke God's name, followed by an angry "damnit."

 

This thread was just the laugh I needed on a shitty night following a shitty fucking month. Yes, I curse in the newsroom, though sometimes more for effect during a ball-busting session than in anger. I've gotten careful about it because a rat bastard asshole who set me up with no help wrote me up for cursing him out after he bitched me out for missing deadline by 20 minutes. And this was after he'd been told at least a dozen times in the days leading up to that night that the workload was going to be nightmarish late and I'd need help.

Funniest swear-fest I ever heard: one of the female features editors muttering "bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch," under her breath, to which someone else said, "It's roll call in features."

 

First they take away cigarettes, then whiskey, now this. Mind you, I have two impressionable young boys and I tend to cuss like Winnie the Pooh when I cuss at all. But in the newsroom all bets are off. F-bombs drop liberally in the newsroom, even more so on deadline. It's a wonderful song.

 

I'm a rookie compared to most of you (I think), but I've worked in/filed from enough newsrooms, well over a dozen, to be turned off by pervasive, casual swearing in the sports dept. I guess that, unlike buckweaver, I equate using profanity with a generalized dissatisfaction/frustration/anger. It's a difference in opinion; there's no objective measure of how profane are "fuck," "shit," "bitch," etc., or any combination of the aforementioned. ("bitch, etc.!!!" is pretty biting.) They just aren't words that I want to represent me or how I'm feeling at a given moment – religious sentiments aside. We're all judged by the words we choose and I try not to choose "profane words" when I'm pissed. I fail often.
It's unprofessional only in the sense that, if my boss is around, I feel I'm giving her/him the impression of a problem in the workplace.

 

I cursed long before I worked in journalism. I saw lots of Bruce Willis movies in my teens and had blue-collar factory worker parents. It's just the way people around me talked. I'd say that it really grew when I started driving.

 

So, I ask again: what makes my choice of "fuck!" so much more profane than my grandmother's choice of "shootfire" when we're expressing the exact same sentiment in the exact same tone?

 

i hope you're not asking me because i think you know my fucking answer.

 

i constantly get beaten down on this web site.

 

I once had a co-worker play "Unclefucker" from South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut on his Boombox.

Laughed out asses off.

 

I've noticed that shops with modern computers that have enough memory and processing speed to pull off requested tasks usually reduce the level of cursing. Just a thought.