Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz started quite a little firestorm by using the F-word when she was so rudely Fired.

That curse and Bartz’s subsequent inquiry to Yahoo! chairman Roy Bostock – Why don’t you have the balls to tell me yourself? – seemed perfectly well-placed to me.

Unsurprisingly, Bartz’s salty speech has brought out the League of Ladies Against Women to instruct the younger generation that they’ll never make it to the C-Suite if they dare to utter “men’s words” because, well, it’s not ladylike.

People Who Swear and the Positive Deployment of Profanity

Over at Psychology Today, we learn that: 

personality research suggests that people who swear more, not surprisingly, score higher on traits such as extraversion, dominance, hostility and Type A personalities. Swearing is not just for the uneducated or people of a lower socioeconomic class — it knows no social boundaries in its expression.

Swearing is not only the behavior of an alpha dog, it actually reduces physical pain so you can imagine how helpful it is to people suffering the emotional pain of disrespect and indignity in the workplace.

It would be better, I know, if I went to the gym regularly and ate my broccoli but when you’re trying a three-month quarter-billion dollar federal antitrust case and putting in seven-day-weeks of 12-hour-days, that gym and broccoli thing just slips away. Same for being in the hot cauldron of conflict from 9 a.m. until 3 a.m. the next morning without a break, mediating a construction defect lawsuit with 20 parties and their rambunctious attorneys.

The Pharmaceutical Effects

You’d forgive a girl in those circumstances the occasional swear word, wouldn’t you? Especially if you knew that swearing reduces pain even more strongly in women than in men because we haven’t dulled its palliative effects by over-use. And really, I’ve never heard anyone in the commercial world say, “Well, shoot, Susan can take her $12 million book of business somewhere else if she’s going to swear in a partnership meeting.”

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