On Swearing or Why Ethos Matters

Soldiers swear. Stunning, I know, but we do. Also, there's gambling going on, if you want to be shocked about that too. But apparently, some look upon swearing as "a bad thing" so we, especially we in wannabe Special Forces, try to moderate our speech in more cultured company, read: everyone else. So while we might prefer to pepper our speech with the appropriate inappropriatities, we don't really care or notice if someone doesn't swear.

But what does flag on our radar is when someone, in this case a sports psychologist by training briefing us on "mental performance of elite athletes", starts throwing around words like "heck" or "freaking". Those are words pretty much restricted to (a) children trying out their provocative little sea legs for the first time and (b) old church ladies. And now, apparently, (c) guy who wants to act like he relates to his audience, but can't quite bring himself to do it properly. He may actually be someone who uses "darn" is his everyday conversation, or he might be restraining himself for religious reasons. He might have any host of legitimate reasons for using those words as he does. But to us, it ended up sounding like he was a poseur.

So as his brief continues, he starts talking about various phases of our training as examples of the hardships we'll go through, as examples for applying what he's talking about. His models seemed coherent and useful, insofar as I know anything about sports psychology or psych theories for elite performers (read: nothing). He seemed to be making attempts to relate to his audience, to incorporate examples from our training into his presentation, all perfectly acceptable rhetorical strategies. But as the presentation progressed, it became more obvious that he didn't actually know much at all about our training or mission. He threw around acronyms and their extensions in a haphazard fashion characteristic of someone who doesn't speak in those terms all that often, i.e. someone unfamiliar with the Army, and someone specifically unfamiliar with what we did.

This doesn’t disqualify his statements or the utility of their application. But we couldn't take him seriously. He talked himself out of his own presentation. The metamessage undermined his text, and because of that, we couldn't grant him leniency for a civilian contractor who couldn't really be expected to understand in detail what we do. But if you're doing to step up, swinging lingo that's clearly foreign and acting like you're part of a club without paying the membership dues, don't be surprised if people stop paying attention.