One of the burdens of public school teaching is dreaded duty. There’s cafeteria, playground, restroom, hall, bus duty and probably a host of other punishments teachers get subjected to when they first sign on to “earn the big bucks and get three months’ vacation every year.”

Now, my English teacher would question the use of quotation marks above, so I need to stress they’re deliberate. By using the unattributed quote marks, I’m being ironic and saying teachers don’t earn much and seldom get vacations, as they’re too busy going to summer school to keep up their credentials.

Years back, I was sharing playground duty in a high school when I saw my co-teacher approach a group of freshmen with, “Don’t you see I’m in the area? I can hear the bad words. Don’t use them in front of me.”

I heard them too, expletives flying from one group of boys to another, with the F-word the most prominent. The teacher, Robert, ushered the most offending boys to the principal’s office for a dressing down. Instead, I imagine the boys liked it. With ministerial tone, the principal lectured them on being good citizens, while lighting up a cigarette and blowing smoke their way.

Many years later, Ruben, one of the users of foul language, told me he looked forward to visits to the principal’s office, as he enjoyed having the smoke blown his way — without having to pay for it.

So what we had was a situation in which purveyors of profanity supposedly got punished by the principal, when it turns out, at least one of them loved playing the penitent.

Several things about keeping a civil tongue on the playground still puzzle me. Of course, we expect students not to be abusive, but at no time in my life did I think a word, or a string of them, could do harm.

What’s in a word? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, as Shakespeare said.

Here are some specifics on the use of language, as heard by one who tuned in right-wing talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, deliberately, the day after the election. I wanted to hear his take on Barack Obama’s landslide victory.

Quite revealing was the constant attempts by callers to sanitize the language. For example, instead of using “damn,” the callers and Limbaugh himself employed “darn.” And we heard “shoot,” “shucks,” “geez,” “gosh” and even “fooey.”

Aren’t all of these terms really euphemisms, terms we use so we can claim we didn’t really utter a “bad word”?

But back to the high school freshmen: The message my friend Robert gave was simply that coarse language isn’t really so bad — provided there’s no teacher on duty to hear it. It’s a linguistic variation on the question, “If a tree falls in the forest….”

This week, members of the United States Supreme Court have been wrestling with foul language on the airwaves, with the question as to whether TV and radio stations may be fined for allowing the use of “fleeting expletives” such as the F-word. According to a news report, the justices eschewed use of the F-word altogether.

The radio station that carries Rush Limbaugh obviously has a several-second delay to allow station engineers to bleep any profanity or obscenity before the audience hears it. But what about totally live performances?

At a Golden Globe Awards ceremony, an Irish rock band singer, Bono, used the expression, “really, really f—— brilliant.”

What about the case in which Nicole Richie said on live television, “It’s not so f—— simple” to remove “cow s— out of a Prada purse”?

Ironically, though this column is largely an exposition on the F-word, I can’t use it here, this being a family paper. In fact, in Wednesday’s lead story about a murder charge, we used “satanic (expletive)” to refer to alleged remarks made by the suspect. Surely many readers have attempted to fill in the blanks.

Well, this column won’t contain a moral or a definitive treatise of how or why words offend. The F-word is offensive not by what it describes but the manner in which it’s uttered and the wallop we hope it carries. We don’t use the word around people we like. And besides, the sound of the word is ugly, a blatant fricative followed by an equally clumsy plosive. Not pretty sounds.

Optic sports editor Dave Kavanaugh recently referred to me in print as a “strait-laced language cop.” I agree. But would you believe cops can also go baaaad?

Here’s how:

I liked to provide eight-ounce boxes of fruit juice for every Highlands faculty senate meeting when I was a member. As I neared retirement from Highlands, a colleague thanked me in front of the senate for having juiced up the meetings. Someone asked me whether I owned stock in Minute Maid, a juice company. I don’t.

I jokingly shot back, “From now on you can get your own freaking juice.”

“Freaking”? Was that F-word substitute just another way around the more offensive Anglo-Saxon four-letter word? Perhaps.

I ran into a fellow ex-senator at, of all places, an Opera Guild outing this summer, and she reminded me of the juice and, especially, of my choice of words. Yes, I remembered.

“Do you realize that you offended several of us?” she asked.

“But I was smiling. Nobody took me seriously,” I answered. Yeah, right. So I’ve been guilty of offending through language.

I’d gone most of my life believing that it’s not the words themselves, but the thoughts behind them that count.

I stand corrected.

One of the burdens of public school teaching is dreaded duty. There’s cafeteria, playground, restroom, hall, bus duty and probably a host of other punishments teachers get subjected to when they first sign on to “earn the big bucks and get three months’ vacation every year.”

Now, my English teacher would question the use of quotation marks above, so I need to stress they’re deliberate. By using the unattributed quote marks, I’m being ironic and saying teachers don’t earn much and seldom get vacations, as they’re too busy going to summer school to keep up their credentials.

Years back, I was sharing playground duty in a high school when I saw my co-teacher approach a group of freshmen with, “Don’t you see I’m in the area? I can hear the bad words. Don’t use them in front of me.”

I heard them too, expletives flying from one group of boys to another, with the F-word the most prominent. The teacher, Robert, ushered the most offending boys to the principal’s office for a dressing down. Instead, I imagine the boys liked it. With ministerial tone, the principal lectured them on being good citizens, while lighting up a cigarette and blowing smoke their way.

Many years later, Ruben, one of the users of foul language, told me he looked forward to visits to the principal’s office, as he enjoyed having the smoke blown his way — without having to pay for it.

So what we had was a situation in which purveyors of profanity supposedly got punished by the principal, when it turns out, at least one of them loved playing the penitent.

Several things about keeping a civil tongue on the playground still puzzle me. Of course, we expect students not to be abusive, but at no time in my life did I think a word, or a string of them, could do harm.

What’s in a word? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, as Shakespeare said.

Here are some specifics on the use of language, as heard by one who tuned in right-wing talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, deliberately, the day after the election. I wanted to hear his take on Barack Obama’s landslide victory.

Quite revealing was the constant attempts by callers to sanitize the language. For example, instead of using “damn,” the callers and Limbaugh himself employed “darn.” And we heard “shoot,” “shucks,” “geez,” “gosh” and even “fooey.”

Aren’t all of these terms really euphemisms, terms we use so we can claim we didn’t really utter a “bad word”?

But back to the high school freshmen: The message my friend Robert gave was simply that coarse language isn’t really so bad — provided there’s no teacher on duty to hear it. It’s a linguistic variation on the question, “If a tree falls in the forest….”

This week, members of the United States Supreme Court have been wrestling with foul language on the airwaves, with the question as to whether TV and radio stations may be fined for allowing the use of “fleeting expletives” such as the F-word. According to a news report, the justices eschewed use of the F-word altogether.

The radio station that carries Rush Limbaugh obviously has a several-second delay to allow station engineers to bleep any profanity or obscenity before the audience hears it. But what about totally live performances?

At a Golden Globe Awards ceremony, an Irish rock band singer, Bono, used the expression, “really, really f—— brilliant.”

What about the case in which Nicole Richie said on live television, “It’s not so f—— simple” to remove “cow s— out of a Prada purse”?

Ironically, though this column is largely an exposition on the F-word, I can’t use it here, this being a family paper. In fact, in Wednesday’s lead story about a murder charge, we used “satanic (expletive)” to refer to alleged remarks made by the suspect. Surely many readers have attempted to fill in the blanks.

Well, this column won’t contain a moral or a definitive treatise of how or why words offend. The F-word is offensive not by what it describes but the manner in which it’s uttered and the wallop we hope it carries. We don’t use the word around people we like. And besides, the sound of the word is ugly, a blatant fricative followed by an equally clumsy plosive. Not pretty sounds.

Optic sports editor Dave Kavanaugh recently referred to me in print as a “strait-laced language cop.” I agree. But would you believe cops can also go baaaad?

Here’s how:

I liked to provide eight-ounce boxes of fruit juice for every Highlands faculty senate meeting when I was a member. As I neared retirement from Highlands, a colleague thanked me in front of the senate for having juiced up the meetings. Someone asked me whether I owned stock in Minute Maid, a juice company. I don’t.

I jokingly shot back, “From now on you can get your own freaking juice.”

“Freaking”? Was that F-word substitute just another way around the more offensive Anglo-Saxon four-letter word? Perhaps.

I ran into a fellow ex-senator at, of all places, an Opera Guild outing this summer, and she reminded me of the juice and, especially, of my choice of words. Yes, I remembered.

“Do you realize that you offended several of us?” she asked.

“But I was smiling. Nobody took me seriously,” I answered. Yeah, right. So I’ve been guilty of offending through language.

I’d gone most of my life believing that it’s not the words themselves, but the thoughts behind them that count.

I stand corrected.