Serving C*nt: The Consequences of Slang in an Atomized Culture

Context is Everything in your Writing

We live in an atomized culture. We don’t watch the same shows, listen to the same music, or follow the same celebrities. Increasingly, we don’t even use the same words to express ourselves. Or, if we do, we don’t think they mean the same things.

It’s a big problem, especially for writers and other communicators. A recent contribution to the Ask a Manager advice column highlighted this perfectly.

Most everyone has worked in an office. So please read this and reflect on how this would have been received at any of your past jobs: (Question and response have been abridged)

Mentee Fired for a Vulgar Term

by Alison Green on March 25, 2025

1. My mentee was fired for using a vulgar term

I work in a regulated industry and there are specific education and license requirements to work here. My company has a mentorship program for those who are new to the industry. I was assigned an entry-level employee from my company, “Wendy.”

I thought things were going well. Wendy was bright and on the ball. But Wendy was let go from her job and I’m wondering if I should have done more to advocate for her. I think this was a misunderstanding. Wendy had (to me) expressed her admiration for one of the managers at our company, “Caitlin.” Wendy said Caitlin was “serving C-word” (not abbreviated when she said it). She meant this as a compliment.

Caitlin didn’t see it that way. She thought Wendy was insulting her. Caitlin felt Wendy was calling her a name to other people, clients, and online when she found out Wendy had been saying it. I completely understand why Caitlin thought it was an insult. I also see Wendy’s point of view and have never known her to be malicious. I feel guilty for not pushing back to my manager when Wendy was let go over this.

Response:

First, for people who don’t know the expression, it basically means “unapologetically feminine and powerfully badass.” It is intended to be complimentary — and it very much would not sound that way to anyone who didn’t know the meaning.

Anyway, this isn’t on you. Yes, you could have explained where Wendy was coming from, but I imagine Wendy did that herself anyway. The issue is that she displayed pretty terrible judgment! It would be one thing for her to have said that about Caitlin once, but saying it repeatedly was just tremendously bad judgment in a work context, where lots of people won’t know the meaning of a very vulgar and insulting-sounding slang phrase. Her intentions matter, but the outcome matters too, and the outcome in this case was that she was going around using a wildly vulgar phrase about a well-known woman in your industry without contemplating that it might be misunderstood or otherwise become an issue. I wouldn’t have fired her for it (to me it’s a coaching moment, not a firing one) but I’m also not surprised that someone did.

This was Wendy’s mistake, not yours.

The Evolution of Slang

Slang has always served as an in-group marker and the business world is no different. It is exclusive and exclusionary by nature and each in-group makes its own slang with its own purpose.

Corpo speak, despite its bad rap, was constructed for a specific purpose. Its constant stream of euphemisms like “We’re gonna circle back to that offline,” are designed to maintain a professional, unemotional decorum that preserves the dignity of your windbag colleague. It’s infinitely better than its colloquial translation: “We don’t have time for your rambling today, Teddy.”

But when you try to inject the slang of a different in-group into the corporate world, you get a problem.

So-called marginalized communities have often tried to transform pejoratives into positive expressions, mostly unsuccessfully. The black community uses Nigga (Soft A) as a positive or familiar expression, usually between men. It’s caught on somewhat, but still isn’t acceptable at work.

The Hard R, on the other hand, still maintains its room-silencing vitriol, even when said by other black people.

And then we have the idiot in the article who thought she could drop a C bomb at work, and have it be okay.

“Oh but I didn’t mean it that way.”

Never mind the age-old question of Intent vs Impact. Think of the legal considerations.

We also don’t know if “Wendy” is really a she (Ask a Manager and its readership are famously ultra-lib). Because ask yourself where the term “serving cunt” came from. Which community spawned that term? We get a lot of our slang from black culture (AAVE), especially online. So was it black people?

No. It came out of the drag community. Men dressing as exaggerated caricatures of women decided that “serving cunt” was a compliment, a goal they were striving for. And Wendy may well have been one of them.

Very Woman. Much Respectful

The appropriation of womanhood aside, the C bomb also has different contexts depending on where you’re from. There’s a BIG difference in how cunt is used in the UK and Ireland (and Australia and NZ) vs. here in the US. It’s not a big deal there, and most often it’s used to dismiss an idiot (usually male). Technically it’s a gendered slur, but it’s rarely lobbed at women. I honestly have no idea about Canada, but they’re probably more in line with us on this one.

But even the eternally vulgar Australians would not think saying this to or about a female supervisor in a work context would be acceptable. I won’t be convinced.

The people who like to pretend that this behavior is acceptable at work are playing a not-subtle game of one-upmanship: My in-group is more important than yours.

They’re the same people who say, “bring your whole self to work,” and “The personal is political.”

But you shouldn’t and it isn’t. The workplace has its own language and culture that you, special snowflake, are required to fit into in order to succeed. Trying to remake that culture into something just for you introduces chaos; it destroys culture.

Diversity, as it turns out, is not anyone’s strength

Whether your slang comes from being terminally online, being a native-born son of Memphis, or being a member of a buzzword-heavy ingroup (like Scientology), understand that the slang is not universal. It’s not right for all places and all people.

Code-switching is a good thing, and you should use it.

And for God’s sake don’t use the C word at work. Ever.