This is a family newspaper, a publication that seeks never to offend its readers. Accordingly, when a public official expressed his contempt, a few years ago, toward the media, our page-one article simply used “a–.” The elected official had authorized the media to pucker up and then osculate a certain nether portion of his anatomy.

I believe people got the picture, even if we bowdlerized the more graphic word, which, by the way, appears in Christmas carols, including “What Child Is This?”

Now we have a, well, touchier issue, picked up by newspapers and other news outlets across the world. It seems that in a criticism of the way President Obama is handling immigration, his erstwhile opponent’s running mate, Sarah Palin, said he lacks the necessary equipment to deal with the issue, presumably, “like a man.”

I’m certainly no biologist nor psychologist, but I’ve always wondered why and how a pair of bodily objects determine how macho presidents and others ought to be.

But Palin’s an even worse student of the sciences when she asserts that Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer does have the requisite equipment. Brewer is the governor who signed an Arizona senate bill, SB 1070, requiring law enforcement personnel to be more tenacious in ferreting out illegals.

A district judge just recently put a halt to some of the more controversial parts of Arizona’s law. One part requires police to check people’s immigration status while attempting to enforce other laws. Presumably, someone who runs a stop sign or has a defective taillight could ultimately face deportation. Another part temporarily disabled by the judge requires immigrants to carry their papers at all times.

Palin said, on Fox News earlier this month, “Jan Brewer has the cojones that our president does not have to look out for all Americans, not just Arizonans, but all Americans.” What a relief that Palin cleared that up! Not only can the former Alaska governor see Russia from her house in Wasilla, but also she apparently can see through clothes, to check for endowments, or the lack thereof.

That kind of x-ray vision is a skill only the late Superman had; he could see through objects, that is, unless thwarted by that pesky kryptonite. Palin has created one heckuva hermaphroditic conundrum by ascribing, to a female governor, body parts women ought not have, and men ought.

But aside from the amusement factor, I wonder about the use of the word itself. In most languages, people tend to become quite graphic, in relation to their passion about the subject. Could Palin, or someone like her, have expressed her contempt for the president by arguing, “Obama lacks the biceps” to deal with immigration? What about the spine?

All of these metaphors could qualify, but people often want to make the point strongly, and become graphic.

Another curi-oditty about the cojones-slinging has to do with its quite common use by people who apparently just recently learned the word and who wouldn’t dream of using it except in a put-down context. Dictionaries variously define the word as “vulgar” for testicles.

But cojones serve an even more amazing — if not contradictory — role. Yes, the Spanish equivalent of ‘nads can be used both as praise and as a putdown. In some contexts this English loanword means courage, in others it’s brazenness and foolhardiness.

I can scarcely recall hearing any Spanish speaker using the Spanish word “cojones” to describe an abundance of, or lack of, machismo. Two local Hispanics I spoke to only Monday insisted they’d never heard the word and asked for a definition. Charging that a person lacks cojones is equivalent to saying someone lacks the balls to do such and such.

Course talk aside, I believe it’s almost always non-Spanish speakers who use the expression. For many, it’s just one of a handful of Spanish words they’ve acquired in their lifetimes. When Anglo land developers in “The Milagro Beanfield War” debated the size and quantity of the cojones of Ben, a local, who diverted a water stream to his beanfield, one of the characters, Melanie Griffith, became enchanted by the word.

She needed to keep repeating “cojones,” but her pronunciation was more like “coe-hone-ease.”

Given our penchant at the Optic to sanitize coarse language, we could say that the president “lacks the conejos (not the cojones) to deal with immigration.” A conejo, of course, is not a male’s body part but a rabbit.

Hmmm. That might work. Nobody would be offended by such a word, and when it comes to embodying all aspects of fertility, a conejo just can’t be beat. You can be assured that conejos have cojones.