There isn't enough soap to wash all the profanity from young mouths these days

It isn't true any longer, but one of the things the sixth-grade at Lincoln School was famous for when I was a kid was an exponential increase in the number of cuss words we learned: It went from none to about seven.

Now that formerly taboo information finds its way into a youngster's vocabulary or repository of unnecessary trivia just about the same time he learns to speak in sentences because his parents often talk that way and his music, written by genius wordsmiths, feature five dirty words in every grouping of six. We don't need no schools to learn us that kind of (obscenity deleted).

The big difference these days is the fact we went from the "Seven words you can't say on television" according to the late George Carlin, to "The 50 million politically incorrect words, implications and raising of eyebrows you can't say or do on TV, that is, except the seven words you used to couldn't say on TV which now are used all the time because they aren't 'politically incorrect' anymore."

What's so childish about the new word politics is the fact the blanks actually speak louder than words themselves, like the "b-word", the "n-word", the "s-word", the "f-word" and so on.

Lives there a person who wasn't on life support for the last 10 years who doesn't both know what is meant but also sort of mentally mouths the words when they are thusly described but not spoken? It reminds me of the prude that hated a guy because he kept whistling dirty songs.

When we were sixth graders, certain words, actually spoken in secret, were enough to make us laugh so hard we couldn't talk. The one thing that never, ever happened, however, was the fact no mom or dad ever heard such words from the mouth of one of their kids. I suppose we thought our mothers, in particular, since they were saints and never, never used that language themselves, would collapse in a heap if we said something like that in the house and we would therefore be guilty of involuntary manslaughter or something (But then, when dad found out, he might come close to committing "butt slaughter" at the very least).

Another thing that changed, especially in the minds of folks who are so politically correct they can hardly breathe, is the fact nothing is funny anymore, i.e.: How many peg-legged, prematurely gray, funky breathed and goofy dressing, feminist, whale-loving, Berkeley, progressive attorneys does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: "That's not funny!"

The easy answer to the question alluded to in this article is: We didn't use bad language because no one else did. The line in "Gone with the Wind" where Clark Gable says, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," was so shocking to most people they still aren't over it.

My dad used a word that is commonly used to describe a fatherless child when he talked about politicians, but that's as far as he went.

In recent times, I have heard people talk who were frustrated because they couldn't cram enough dirty words into an ordinary sentence so they would hyphenate multi-syllabic words and sneak a four letter obscenity into the middle of one or more of them.

I have dozens of teachers as patients who tell me what the kids say in school these days. Sending such kids to the office is presently an exercise in futility. There isn't enough Lifebuoy soap in the whole world to wash out as many mouths as need it now. The principal at Needham School, Mr. A.T. Smith, who lived well past 100 years, would still be working his way down to the end of the line of gutter-mouthed kids who needed his own brand of motivation if the kids I went to school with demonstrated their prowess at debasing the language as much as the kids do now.

The teachers who really want to teach, and there are many thousands, are completely stymied by the political correctness being shown in the principal's offices. And those poor (b-word) have no recourse either.

Bob Bader is a Lodi chiropractor and writer.