Quote Originally Posted by bmccasland View Post
Drop a brick on your foot, colorful language is probably appropriate, but in the work place it isn't.
What if you drop a brick on your foot in the workplace? :P

The professor I did my senior projects with swears a lot. I can understand it if something the lab's been working on for months didn't work and the project has to be scrapped or something. Not at group meetings. Swearing at grad students is just rude and unnecessary--I lost a lot of the respect I had for him after one meeting... Needless to say, I didn't ask him for a recommendation letter. Granted, this guy has a lot of other social issues as well.

I can completely understand some degree of swearing in this context (chemistry lab), though. The otherwise-terminally polite lab manager/post-doc let out a cluster f-bomb when the thing he'd been trying for a week didn't work, and would regularly describe things as "sh*tty". Thing is, no one other than (under)grad students and maybe the professor would hear it.

In an actual office setting, it's inappropriate. Unless the coffee machine catches fire or something, of course.