Or as Hatch told this newspaper recently when he visited Salt Lake City, "I got an e-mail from someone who said, 'Your words become your actions, your actions become your behavior, your behavior becomes your character, and your character becomes your destiny.' So your words become where you're going."

That's gutsy stuff coming from a teenager in a nation where prime-time television — the stuff created by the adult world — struggles to rhyme with a high school locker room. The Parents Television Council, which actually hires people to sit and count such things, found almost 11,000 expletives aired during prime time in 2007.

The U.S. Supreme Court also recently made news for daring to rule that the FCC did indeed have the right to fine networks for allowing "fleeting expletives" of a certain severity to cross the public airwaves and enter the inanimate boxes that now, ironically, swear at us.

I doubt whether cussing really was a lost art in 1949, but the danger, then and now, isn't so much that it exists. It is that we will forget how to react to it, and why.

Jay Evensen is editor of the Deseret News edito?rial page. E-mail: even@desnews.com. Visit his blog at www.deseretnews.com/blogs.