20131027.1119

The entries in this blog have, from time to time, carried the label NSFW, indicating that they are not safe for work.  Usually this is because, like this post (which itself carries the label), they use such words as fuck or damn, or they make...indelicate reference to certain parts of the body or functions of them, stating rather than euphemizing them.  But the idea of what counts as safe for work or unsafe for work makes a number of assumptions about the workplace, assumptions which may not always or even often hold.

Several sources of perhaps dubious validity discuss the matter (neither the online OED nor the online Webster do).  UrbanDictionary.com offers fairly cursory, user-generated descriptions here.  Wikipedia offers more detail here.  Know Your Meme offers still more here.  Each speaks to the idea that reference to such things as sex, drugs (but not rock and roll), profanity (variously defined), and gratuitous violence (usually indicated by the amount of blood shown and the degree of detail in depictions of inflicted injuries) bars a given item from being fit for discussion in the workplace.  Several comments note that the display of NSFW materials is likely to result in formal disciplinary action (it can be construed as one of several forms of harassment, for example, and easily as inappropriate use of company resources) up to and including termination (and possibly prosecution, depending on the material and the locality).

Again, though, what is true in one workplace is not necessarily true of others.  My work in the academic humanities, for example, often legitimately runs to notions otherwise NSFW.  One cannot discuss Mark Twain without addressing racial epithets.  One cannot meaningfully engage Shakespeare without running into issues of pedophilia (Romeo and Juliet), cannibalism (Titus Andronicus), possible incest (Hamlet), and sexualities overt and covert (Much Ado about Nothing, the sonnets, etc.).  Chaucer, Spenser's "well of English undefiled," rolls around in materials routinely considered objectionable; fart jokes and adultery abound in his Canterbury Tales, and in the Miller's Tale, well, it is difficult to interpret "prively he caughte hire by the queynte" as anything other than a rather intimate touch that anymore could result in sexual assault charges.  Yet I get to talk about such things (and more!) as a matter of course; on the rare occasions when people have complained about such content, I have been able to point to the texts and demonstrate "legitimate academic interest," so that what is otherwise NSFW becomes not just safe, but vital, for work.

Lest it be thought that it is simply an artifact of being a pointy-headed intellectual elitist, one who tries to undermine all that is right and good in the world and who does things no "decent" person would do, let us note also traditional depictions of sailors' talk--or that of any fighting folk, whose speech is sown with such terms as once got children's mouths well soaped.  Their work is highly valued by many, even by many who would abjure mine for some of the reasons noted above, and yet they speak freely of such things in the course of their duties.  And "real" doctors, of course, have to handle such things daily, eminently indelicately, yet they are not censured for having pictures of gaping wounds and festering pustulent flesh on their working screens.  What is safe for work changes depending upon the work, of course, but that the default assumption is as it is suggests things about what the default workplace is--and that is pretty much fucked up.