My Mom used to keep a small porcelain dish on the coffee table shaped like a swan. It held pastel mints and, more importantly, judgment. If you said something like “that’s stupid,” she wouldn’t yell or lecture. She would simply look at you over the rim of her glasses as if you had just licked the swan.
I think about that swan often now that I am a grown man. I think it of most often when my language occasionally lapses into what, in the Aristotelian sense, might be referred to as “blue” or “off-color.”
It’s amazing how one little word can send people reaching for their emotional pearls. You would have thought I’d set fire to a puppy. I had not. I had merely suggested that a plan involving fourteen manual Excel exports, three cron jobs duct-taped together with hope, and a PowerPoint labeled “Final_v27” might not represent the pinnacle of human thought.
“That’s moronic,” I said, to the audible gasps of many.
In another instance, I mentioned that most people writing about AI on LinkedIn are idiots. This was apparently too much. The platform, I was gently reminded, is a professional space. A space for thought leadership. A space where men in vests explain, with serene confidence, that they have unlocked “10X value” by asking ChatGPT to summarize an article they didn’t read.
“Idiot” was considered harsh.
And then there was the time I said I was so excited about a project that I wanted to strip naked and dance down the street. I did not, to be clear, remove any clothing. I was speaking metaphorically. But metaphor, I have learned, is dangerous territory. Someone somewhere imagined me twirling past a Starbucks and felt unsafe.
The feedback came in waves. Some of it kind. Some of it less so. A few messages suggested I might benefit from “more professional tone alignment.” One recommended I “leverage emotionally neutral language constructs.”
Emotionally neutral language constructs. I picture them as beige cubes. You can stack them in any order and they will never offend anyone, never surprise anyone, and never make anyone feel the sudden electric jolt of recognition that says, Yes. That. Exactly that. This is where AI enters, smoothing everything like a hotel iron pressed against the wrinkled shirt of human expression.
We now have machines that can turn “This plan is a flaming pile of trash on a barge drifting toward the waterfall of budget overruns” into “This proposal may benefit from additional risk mitigation analysis.” Both sentences are technically correct.
I understand the desire for civility. I do. I am not advocating that we wander into meetings and start hurling gerunds like hand grenades. There is a difference between being vivid and being cruel. “Moronic” may not have been my finest hour. It landed harder than I intended. Words do that. They leave the mouth with a jaunty wave and arrive at the other end wearing steel-toed boots. But I worry that in our rush to optimize for safety, we have begun to optimize away humanity.
We are increasingly fluent in what I call Airport English. It is the language of delay announcements and corporate apologies. It is perfectly calibrated to offend no one and inspire even fewer. It contains no sweat, awkward laughter, or confession. It is the linguistic equivalent of a carpet patterned specifically to hide stains.
AI is spectacular at Airport English. It has digested the entire internet and learned that the safest sentence is the one least likely to provoke. It can write a LinkedIn post that sounds like a leadership retreat catered by hummus. It can gently reposition your rage into “constructive curiosity.” It can transform “this is idiotic” into “this approach may not align with strategic objectives.” What it cannot do, at least not without borrowing from us, is bleed.
When I say that some AI commentary feels idiotic, I’m not claiming intellectual superiority. I am reacting to something that feels hollow. There is a sameness to it. The phrasing is polished, the cadence agreeable. The thought is often a warmed-over cliché wearing a blazer and pressed khakis from the Amazon basics collection. We are becoming curators of sanitized enthusiasm.
I’ve even caught myself doing it. I’ll write something sharp and funny and a little dangerous. Then, I’ll run it through an internal filter. Maybe even an external one. The edges soften. The verbs become responsible. The whole thing sits there like a well-behaved golden retriever. And yet, the moments I remember most in conversation aren’t the beige ones. They’re the moments when someone says, “That idea terrifies me,” instead of “I have concerns.” When someone says, “I am so excited I could scream,” instead of “I am cautiously optimistic.” When someone admits, “I was wrong. Spectacularly, embarrassingly wrong.”
“Stupidly, Idiotically, moronically wrong.”
Human speech is messy because humans are messy. We are not probability distributions seeking maximum likability. We are a bundle of nerves and hopes and ridiculous metaphors about dancing naked in the street.
How do we bring back our humanity without simply becoming jerks?
First, we can learn the difference between heat and light. Heat is calling a person an idiot. Light is saying, “This argument collapses under its own weight.” One scorches; the other illuminates. Both are honest. Only one is gratuitous. Next, we need to own our exaggerations. If I say I want to dance naked in the street, perhaps I scan to room to see if anyone’s fingers being searching for pearls and seek to allay their fears.
We can resist outsourcing our emotions to machines. If you’re angry, figure out why before you ask an algorithm to launder the feeling. If you’re joyful, say so in your own crooked, unoptimized words.
Finally, we can extend a little grace in both directions. To the pearl-clutchers, who may simply prefer their coffee without a side of linguistic cayenne. And to the spice-throwers, who are often just trying to feel alive in a world that often sounds like a Terms and Conditions agreement.
Our goals is never to become outrageous for sport. It is to remain unmistakably human, to risk saying something with color, to occasionally overshoot and apologize, and to laugh at ourselves along the way. Communication is more than just the transfer of information. It’s the transfer of feeling and perspective as well..
The porcelain swan is still there in my mind, watching. I suspect it prefers that I retire “moronic.” Fair enough. But I also suspect it would be bored to death in a world where every sentence is professionally moisturized and emotionally gluten-free.
Somewhere between the flaming trash barge and the risk mitigation analysis lies a voice that is honest, vivid, and kind. I am trying to find it. Fully clothed, of course.
Most of the time.