By Reginal Campbell · October 23, 2026 · 6-minute read

The Executive Tax on Profanity

When a senior leader drops an f-bomb in a room, work stops and threat assessment begins.

Everyone suddenly has a second job: figuring out whether the company is collapsing or the boss just forgot to eat lunch.

I dislike how easily I can picture myself as that boss.

I swear when I’m frustrated. I swear when I’m delighted. Sometimes I’m emphasizing a point. Sometimes the point is doing fine, and I send a four-letter escort anyway.

To me, that feels expressive. To everyone else, it’s noise they have to decode.

This is not a campaign against profanity. I remain fond of it. I’m writing because I’ve met people who swear better than I do, and it bothers me.

One “damn” from them does more work than ten “fucks” from me.

I don’t like losing on efficiency.

Emphasis is a budget

If every minor setback is a “fucking catastrophe,” my team will eventually treat an actual catastrophe like a minor setback. I haven’t communicated urgency. I’ve installed a smoke detector that goes off whenever anyone makes toast.

Worse, I can believe I’m making myself clearer while erasing the difference between “this needs attention” and “I have encountered a Tuesday.” I get emotional catharsis. My team gets homework.

People who keep somewhere to go

Consider three communication styles. These are illustrative portraits, not stories about former colleagues.

The measured speaker finishes a thought and lets it sit. No frantic amendment. No extra adjectives brought in as witnesses. When that person finally calls something a damn problem, the departure from normal does half the work.

The warm, conversational speaker isn’t policing anyone’s language. They laugh. They’re informal. Profanity simply isn’t carrying every sentence. When a curse appears, it tells you something has changed.

Then there’s the person who gets quieter as the stakes rise. While others reach for stronger language, they become specific. They can make a clean sentence feel like the moment somebody should close the door.

None of these people are necessarily wise, kind, or pleasant to sit beside on a delayed flight. Restraint is not a character reference.

The best public example I know is Michael Wilbon. On Pardon the Interruption in September 2024, discussing a golf controversy, he told viewers there were words he would use if he could get away with them on that show. Then he kept them off the air.^[1] He clearly had the vocabulary. He chose the venue. The point landed anyway.

What they all have is headroom.

Their ordinary setting leaves room for an exceptional one. Mine sometimes runs at full volume for things that deserve a murmur. Then something genuinely serious arrives, and I have nowhere left to go.

Apparently, I’ve used the emergency exit to fetch coffee.

Part of that habit has a training record. I was a fluent cusser long before I enlisted, but I honed the dialect in the Army, where profanity was affectionate taxonomy. If nobody was giving you hell, you weren’t trusted yet. Silence meant probation. Insults meant you belonged to the unit.

The problem arises when I bring motor-pool affection into a Q3 status meeting.

The same word that bonds a squad can freeze a conference room. Language that reads as brotherhood between veterans or longtime collaborators can sound like hostility, or an HR incident, to someone new. Culture, familiarity, and emotional context don’t disappear because I consider myself easygoing.

Authority changes the math

Rank doesn’t disappear either.

When I’m the most senior person in the room, my frustration doesn’t stay mine. Someone else is wondering whether they caused it, whether disagreement is still welcome, or whether laughing is now part of the assignment.

That last possibility bothers me. I can mistake a room accommodating my mood for a room enjoying my personality.

“I didn’t mean it that way” is relevant information. It is not a verdict.

The executive tax is every minute a team spends decoding my mood instead of fixing the problem. It is payable by everyone except the executive. When I use rank to dump unfiltered frustration on a room and call it being authentic, I’m not leading. I’m charging my people an anxiety tax to subsidize my own lack of discipline.

That’s harder to laugh off than having a colorful vocabulary.

The useful question is straightforward: When did I last swear deliberately? When did I last swear on autopilot?

No profanity spreadsheet required. I want to notice whether I chose the emphasis or arrived carrying it.

Sometimes a pause would do more. Sometimes an unusually plain sentence would make the seriousness unmistakable. I don’t need to keep adding voltage because I’m uncomfortable letting a thought stand.

The hierarchy at home

The clearest view I have of how shamelessly authority distorts language is my own household.

I do not swear in front of my mother. Ever. I am a grown man, and some boundary lines are poured in concrete. I swear in front of my kids regularly. Yet if one of those same kids drops a four-letter word in my direction, I react with the righteous fury of Joe Clark wielding a bullhorn in the hallway. The double standard is absolute, irrational, and enforced by rank alone.

Here’s the twist. When I overhear my kids on the phone with their friends and catch a perfectly timed “MFer” or a crisp “bitch, please,” I don’t feel like I’ve failed as a parent. I feel pride. They didn’t just inherit my bad habit. They inherited the precision.

In my living room, the hypocrisy is funny. In an enterprise organization, it isn’t. The same rank that makes it comedy at home makes it a tax at work.

Authenticity is not an exemption

A well-earned “that’s bullshit” can build solidarity faster than a paragraph of diplomatic concern. A polished speaker can avoid every forbidden word and still leave you feeling handled. And I don’t trust a standard of professionalism that conveniently resembles one group’s manners. None of that is in dispute.

What is in dispute is the alibi. “That’s just how I talk” can describe a personality. Unchecked, it describes a habit I’ve decided other people should absorb because I don’t feel like managing it. That isn’t authenticity. It’s laziness with good branding.

Direction matters just as much as volume. Swearing alongside a team is camaraderie. Swearing at someone who never signed up for that culture is humiliation, and a team’s comfort with profanity is not consent to become the target of it.

So counting words won’t settle this. A frequent swearer can be precise. Someone with immaculate language can be cruel. The question is whether I’m responding to the moment or making the moment accommodate me.

Choosing, not counting

Once I look at my language this way, the subject gets larger.

Am I speaking because something needs saying, or because silence makes me uncomfortable? Am I clarifying the problem, or letting frustration write the briefing? Does the situation need escalation, or do I need somewhere to put my annoyance?

Those questions are less flattering than “Am I being authentic?”

They’re also more useful.

I don’t want to become so managed that talking to me feels like reading an approved statement. I want to remain recognizably myself without treating recognition as an exemption from responsibility.

That means owning my language, not appointing myself supervisor of everyone else’s. It means accepting that adjusting to an audience can be consideration rather than surrender.

The people I admire have the capacity to choose. That’s what I envy, underneath my petty resentment about their superior cussing efficiency.

When I hold authority, my vocabulary isn’t just personal style. It’s the weather everyone else has to work in. Save the thunder for the actual storm. Otherwise, when the real crisis arrives, there’s nothing left to signal it, because the volume was already spent convincing everyone a Tuesday was the end of the world.

I still swear. I’m just trying to swear like someone who means it.

Sources

Reice Shipley, “Michael Wilbon wants Pat McAfee’s freedom to curse on ESPN”, Awful Announcing, September 18, 2024. Reports Wilbon’s on-air remark on Pardon the Interruption about language he would use if network standards allowed. ↑

About the author

Reginal Campbell writes about enterprise technology, AI governance, leadership, and the systems organizations build to make consequential decisions.