Television viewers are familiar with notices preceding a certain genre of films usually stating "contains violence and coarse language". The hope is that adults will keep their children from picking up more bad language than they have already acquired from other sources.

Generally children pay little, if any, attention to another danger facing them, the language of politics, more particularly the coarse language used by politicians which may be both heard and read in reports of public debate, in Parliament or lesser bodies.

That language drags politics into the gutter. Many adult viewers and readers find such language offensive. It comes as a shock when they read that this or that politician is so deficient in language skills that he or she must resort to the lowest form of scatological and copulatory expression that laces the speech of the vulgar, the uninformed, and the uneducated who are condemned to a lifetime usage of profanity in attempting to undertake dialogue with their fellows.

True, there are the odd exceptions who seize on each exclamatory excess to bolster their own sense of values, believing in the concept of "telling it as it is". They are oblivious to the fact the all-inclusive "it" can be told in many ways other than the language of the gutter, indeed in ways more incisive than that of gutter speech.

If someone is of questionable lineage or intellectually challenged, there are many more ways to declaim the fact without descending to vulgarity. If someone is so disliked that their mere presence is offensive and their withdrawal is desired, that sentiment can be expressed without descending to vulgarity.

If anyone reading this epistle is offended, there are many more ways of expressing their opinion than using the language of the gutter. A simple "Go pick daisies" would suffice. And would be more hurtful. The writer has arthritic knees.

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