Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4619254-20150923075913/@comment-3112181-20150925215134

WaglingtonŒ wrote: With all due respect, Gio, your accusation against Ned is completely unfounded and needlessly aggressive for someone whose main argument against the motion is "you are intelligent, you can express yourself sensibly."

These are just words. Far be it from anyone to think poorly of you just because you choose to use profanity - you can swear like a sailor and still be able to think clearly and address issues in a rational sense. You can be the most sensitive person on the planet who'd never even think of saying a curse word and be absolutely hopeless intellectually.

With all that said, while I absolutely think something needs to be changed, this isn't the way to go about it. We need a better system than just a page banner - something that we can all agree on. You have my apologies for my colleague's rude comments.

I respectfully in hopes that we can find a better way to articulate this in the near future. I think you're misunderstanding what Johnny was actually saying. He wasn't calling anyone here stupid, nor was he implying it. However – and this is true not just on the Internet, but in life and writing in every form – there is indeed a correlation between excessive cursing and perceived intelligence. Among certain crowds of people, a story (or in this case, a comment), that contains swearing will turn that audience off to the material; cursing in writing is, for the most part, a resort– whether the author drops an "f-bomb" every now and then to seem like a badass or a curse word is being used for character development, it just comes across as sloppy, amateurish, and (at least with me) a method of losing credibility with the writer. There are alternatives to cursing that can have the same effect. Cursing in writing implies a limited vocabulary and a disreputable impression. As Gio put very accurately and beautifully, a video game fanon site that allows cursing just makes us look like angsty pre-teens that discovered the "f-word" for the first time.

I'll say it again, there's no reason why cursing needs to be on the wiki. It just looks unprofessional.