Goldman Sachs has informed its employees that a list of obscene words will no longer be tolerated in company e-mails. The Wall Street Journal Reports as follows.
That means all 34,000 traders, investment bankers and other Goldman employees must restrain themselves from using a vast vocabulary of oft-used dirty words on Wall Street, including the six-letter expletive that came back to haunt the company at a Senate hearing in April.
According to the Wall Street Journal, even using asterisks will be picked up by screening software. The list of offending words was not delivered by e mail, but in a meeting. Presumably, any filtering software would have bounced any memo containing offending words.
There may be unforeseen problems with the profanity screening software. A graduate of the South Houston Institute of Technology would not be able to use the acronym of his alma mater on a resume. An executive director of the Fraternal Union of Cattlemen of Kansas would encounter similar difficulties. Anyone who tries to e mail a copy of the 10 commandments would find the 10th commandment getting flagged by Goldman Sachs software.
On the other hand , circumventing the software might be fairly easy. Signing an e mail “Chuck U. Farley” would give the recipient a fairly clear idea that the sender is unhappy. Character substitution might be a good way of getting profanity through. Instead of straight out profanity, character substitution such as cr@p and the use of the dollar sign in popular profanity might get past the software.
Then of course there will be a list of benign explanations for offensive acronyms. WTF will stand for the World Tennis Federation. BS will stand for “benevolent stewardship”. Instead of criticizing management with a barnyard expletive, you will be praising them for their benevolent stewardship.
In the Goldman Sachs office in New York there is almost certainly a multi ethnic work force. This will make it possible to introduce profanity from around the globe. I worked in an office where we used to curse at each other in Hungarian, Yiddish, Spanish, Russian, Tagalog and Quechua. A truck driver taught us how to say “Kiss my @$$ in Gaelic. Anyone who is determined to spew profanity will find a way to circumvent the software. They could even use Pig Latin
The economy must be in very good shape if Goldman Sachs has time to screen out profanity from company e mails. The infamous meno in which a trader said “boy that was a $hitty deal.” was obscene not for its language but for its message. If clean language reminds Goldman Sachs traders to conduct clean business, then it is a good idea. Otherwise, it is a frivolous waste of time.
Picture from Hotsauce Jane on Flickr
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