WARNING: This story and video contains graphic language. Viewer discretion is advised.
Video of a relatively simple prank pulled off on the recently-opened northeast portion of Edmonton’s ring road has now gone viral while also creating a conversation about swearing, misogyny and political correctness.
From the overdue new Walterdale Bridge, extensive problems with the 102 Avenue bridge to the ongoing problems plaguing the Metro LRT line, Edmontonians have become somewhat accustomed to delays in public infrastructure projects. So when the northeast leg of Anthony Henday Drive opened on time Saturday, there was a celebratory sense on the new stretch of road and someone tried to capture it by entering a message on a flashing digital construction sign that read,” “NEW NORTH A. HENDAY…NOW OPEN..WE DONE B*TCHES.”
The video, posted to Facebook Saturday night, has since been viewed over one million times.
READ MORE: Social media lights up over crude sign on new leg of Edmonton ring road
“You have to giggle at first and then you think, ‘really’? Joanne Blake, a business etiquette expert and president of Style for Success, said of the prank.
A local radio station has interviewed a woman who claims she is the one behind the prank. On Sunday, Alberta Transportation offered a statement on the message.
“Two-thousand people worked very hard to bring this project to completion and there’s obviously a lot of pride in that work,” a ministry spokesperson said. “It seems someone changed the sign as part of the celebrations, however, the wording is not the kind we would use and we had it changed immediately.”
“My client base is corporate to construction and everything in between,” Blake said. “In some environments, that kind of language is much more common and perhaps mainstream but I think we really have to be careful about how we use words and the implication.”
Pierrette Requier, the City of Edmonton’s poet laureate, said swearing is natural for many people and can be funny or help release tension but added it’s important to remember it can have negative impacts.
“It’s a very complex issue,” Requier said. “For example, I was raised in northern Alberta and I was raised with swearing and so I learned the charge that it had and the impact that it had and sometimes the impact was quite negative.”
While the word posted on the sign is usually considered sexist and degrading, an informal survey of social media sites suggests only a small minority of people were offended in this context – including women – and a poll posted on www.globalnews.ca, showed almost 93 per cent of almost 1,800 respondents felt the prank was funny as of 4 p.m. Monday.
Paul O’Neil, music director at 92.5 Fresh Radio, a station owned by Global News’ parent company Corus Entertainment, said his job requires him to gauge what is acceptable to his audience in terms of words and content. While he said he wouldn’t run a song with the “b” word on his station, he suggested he also wasn’t altogether surprised by the majority of Edmontonians not being offended.
“Even 15 years ago, the word that’s on the sign now was more of a big deal than it is now,” O’Neil said.
Blake suggested while there may have been no malicious intent in the prank, the words can still do damage.
“I’m looking at it from a women’s point of view and it is mysogynistic,” she said. “Just because we hear it doesn’t make it right… there’s all kinds of ramifications, (it’s) belittling, disempowering messages that that word entails.”
Requier said she grew up in a household in which swears were commonplace and once even wrote a poem based on the swears and blasphemous words her father used. She also said cursing “cuts through crap and it helps to deal with tension” but added she didn’t consider this particular use of a swear to be very creative.
“I think it’s terribly unimaginative,” she said. “It has a place and at the same time, let’s maybe try to see if we can use some of the other million words at our disposal.”
-With files from Quinn Ohler.
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