This is F-star-pound-king Stupid

Taking ownership of the words we want to say.

One of my favorite Louis CK bits involves three words many people could never get away with saying (and I’m pretty uncomfortable repeating): faggot, cunt, and nigger. Louis explains why these words have starkly different meanings to him, educates us on what those are, then uses them throughout the bit, getting a string of laughs along the way. Here’s the part that really stuck with me:

To me, the thing that offends me the most, is every time that I hear the N-word. Not nigger by the way. I mean the N-word. Literally, whenever a white lady on CNN with nice hair says, The N-word, that’s just white people getting away with saying nigger, that’s all that is. They found a way to say nigger. N-word! It’s bullshit ‘cause when you say the N-word you put the word nigger in the listener’s head. That’s what saying a word is. You say the N-word and I go “Oh, she means nigger.” You’re making me say it in my head! —Louis CK

The genius of his bit is in the words Louis decides to use and his ability to make us understand that these words, in the context of how he wants them to be heard, are completely suitable to the point he is making. He is taking ownership of the words he wants to say in a way that the CNN anchor is not. But that’s a white lady getting orders from somewhere up the corporate news ladder and the FCC. What about those of us in startups or small firms who don’t have a mandatory filter placed on what we want to say?

During a realignment of the Mostly Serious website a couple years ago, our team had a discussion to decide what type of language we could get away with using. We’re a pretty open-minded bunch and the occasional office cursing is all but encouraged. The question was, how much of our casual language were we comfortable using on our site? Should we write sh#t instead of shit? Should we dodge the issue all together and use silly phrases like mother trucker? It took us a while to stop and ask a much better question—are we saying words we want to take ownership of? We landed on saying shit but steered clear of dropping heavier language, mainly because our mothers might decide to peruse our website and we weren’t looking for a lecture. We figured shit would only get squinty eyes and a firm head shake. They raised us to be better than that.

While we eventually pulled back the language we were uncomfortable fully owning, there are many examples of great websites—in both writing and design—that are still trying to use language without taking ownership of it.

Since I’m a visual guy, here are some examples.

Careers section of the Teehan+Lax website: http://www.teehanlax.com/careers/

Let me preface this critique by acknowledging Teehan+Lax is truly making *clears throat* epic shit, and the writing on their website is nothing short of inspirational. But I doubt there is anyone alive who would read this as we’re all about making epic sh-star-t. Why hide a letter from our eyes while putting a word in our minds? The culture at Teehan+Lax is clearly okay with using the word, so why hide behind the star? It may be that they’re afraid to let clients know they say shit, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Either way, it’s see-through.

Interestingly, the site does say hell and shit within the body copy of certain pages, such as The Story of Our Company, but avoids doing so in titles.

Slide 85 of the HubSpot Culture Code deck: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/34234/The-HubSpot-Culture-Code-Creating-a-Company-We-Love.aspx

Following their company’s policy of radical transparency, HubSpot recently released its company culture code deck, which—along with Netflix—is one of the best out there. In the deck, they tell us a pillar of their culture is autonomy and, along those lines, to just f*#cking do it. Maybe they didn’t want to completely steal Nike’s line and decided adding f-star-pound-king helped distance themselves. Maybe, and more likely, they were afraid to drop an f-bomb in their publicly released culture deck. In that case, why fucking use it?