Why I Have a Potty Mouth

9 min readDec 13, 2021

“Clean your language. Be a role model. You should use better words than f***. You may have a good message but the words you use are no good!”

“Someone sent me your post on ‘Finding your passion.’ It was good, but it was presented in a rather disrespectful way. Please cut out the bathroom language, and maybe you’ll get more ‘likes.’”

“Do you have to use such horrible language? Expand your vocabulary! You could be a good writer if you cleaned up your act.”

W hen I started blogging in 2007, I simply tried to write the same way I spoke. Honest. Clear. And with a lot of profanity.

I was a potty mouth. I could be vulgar and crude at times. I probably wrote a lot of things that would embarrass me if I read them today. But I was young and my only readers were a few of my guy friends. So it didn’t matter.

Once I was read by more people, the complaints began to come in. First, it was in a trickle. But as my popularity grew, that trickle became a steady stream of “Don’t you have anything better to say?” and “Only stupid people use those words because they can’t think of anything else to use!”

Eventually, there came a point a few years ago where I really had to sit down and ask myself if it was worth it. Was there any purpose to my profanity, or was it just a bad juvenile habit that one should grow out of, like biting one’s nails or wearing the same underwear two days in a row?

I asked myself two serious questions:

Is this kind of language benefitting me, and if so, how?
And is it worth alienating a large number of people because of some of the words I choose to use?

As you can probably fucking tell by now, I answered the above with 1) yes, it is and 2) yes, fuck ‘em.

I’ll explain my reasons in a minute.

But first, I want to back up for a second and address the most bullshitty of bullshit complaints about profanity: that swear words have no purpose in language, and that people only use them when they are too lazy to think of anything better to say.