The first time I heard the f-word, I was in the Navy, defending our country from enemies in Southern California.

Thursday, March 16, 2000

The first time I heard the f-word, I was in the Navy, defending our country from enemies in Southern California.

I know, I know. It’s everywhere today. Daytime television, movies and almost every vocabulary everywhere.

I tell the story of the day I was in my front yard leaning on a rake in preparation for taking a job with local government, when a little boy rode by on his bicycle.

Something went wrong and the bike tottered to the curb and fell over.

Before I could inquire if he was hurt, he announced to the world, "Oh, %$#$#!"

Then he got up, scraped the sand off his knee and biked away.

He must have been six or seven years old.

He was 10 years ahead of me in using profanities.

Not that I led a sheltered life when I was a child. I heard and used words that I knew were bad, but didn’t know their meanings.

In fact, one day in the fourth grade, when I described an encounter with a skunk on a hike in the woods, I got carried away and announced to everyone, "It stunk like hell."

As I recall, there was stunned silence until the teacher escorted me from the room into the hallway and proceeded to wash my mouth out with soap at the drinking fountain in full view of everyone.

I was too young to recognize an opportunity for a major lawsuit at the time, so I accepted my punishment although I did put up a pretty good fight and tried – albeit too late – to keep my mouth shut at the time she started scrubbing my lips with a bar of Dove.

But after that experience, I never swore in school again. I had learned my lesson.

Of course, before school and after school was a different thing altogether.

Today I am older and presumably wiser, but I still swear. Not regularly, but occasionally. Sometimes, it fits the occasion. When you’re talking to a farmer about manure, chances are a certain four-letter word is used more often than caca-doodoo or some other more sophisticated expression.

Long ago, I learned that the honey wagon doesn’t carry honey in the countryside.

If you get up in the dark of the night to answer the telephone and bump into something, chances are you’re not going to say "Merry Christmas" to the chair that got in the way of your sleepy nocturnal walk through the house.

Of course, there are people -Austin’s mayor Bonnie Rietz comes to mind – who are always in control. The strongest expression I have heard her utter, when excited, is "Shoot the bear."

And try to provoke Daryl Franklin, the county’s zoning administrator, and he may turn red, but you can’t get a reaction.

But the rest of us normal people swear.

Mind you, I don’t cuss to impress anyone. It just happens.

"Swearing is so commonplace, even in public, that many people think it is accepted, but it is only tolerated," says James V. O’Connor, who is president of a public relations firm in Northbrook, Ill. "No one is likely to complain about your use of offensive language, but they will pass judgment on you. Your choice of words determines whether you are viewed as mature, intelligent, polite and pleasant or rude, crude, insensitive and abrasive."

O’Connor believes that most people who use bad language know it is often inappropriate, but do it out of habit.

To help those people, he has written a book entitled "Cuss Control: The Complete Book on How to Curb Your Cursing."

In the book published by Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, O’Connor points out there are two major categories of swearing: casual and casual.

In other words, there is an over-lapping of the reasons for everyone’s swearing. It’s lazy language or provoked by an emotion.

That should be a warning to all of us, but I think swearing will continue.

When hammer meets thumb, swearing a blue streak may not make the pain go away, but it beats grabbing a book to look for advice.

Lee Bonorden’s column appears Thursdays