Last January, movie theaters were showing trailers for a pair of then-upcoming rom-coms, as romantic comedies are referred to these days. After seeing the two trailers back to back and wondering what the heck the people who rate movies were thinking, I wrote that they had officially lost their minds.

The trailers were for the PG-13-rated "The Proposal" and the R-rated "The Ugly Truth," and each one had a similar, surprisingly sexual gag that was a bit shocking in that context.

Now let's be clear. My complaint wasn't about the gags showing up in the movies, although they weren't funny and were decidedly unnecessary. My complaint was that they showed up in the trailers — previews for soon-to-be-released movies, which precede other movies at random, including films aimed at children.

Both trailers started with that familiar "green band": "The following PREVIEW has been approved for ALL AUDIENCES by the Motion Picture Association of America Inc. The film advertised has been rated … " — and then it shows the rating box for that film, be it G, PG, PG-13 or R. (The words in uppercase here are designed to similarly stand out on the green band.)

What I was suggesting was, those gags had no place in trailers that the movie-raters had "approved for all audiences," to include young children. That's just crazy.

But now, that isn't a problem anymore.

That's right, the MPAA has taken steps to prevent that from happening again.

How, you ask? By banning such salacious gags from "all audiences" trailers? No, that would make too much sense.

Instead, the MPAA has slightly redesigned the green band. Instead of "all audiences," it now says "appropriate audiences."

That's right. The green-band statement is now: "The following PREVIEW has been approved for APPROPRIATE AUDIENCES …"

So, what does that mean, you may well ask? After much deep thought and quite a bit of online research, I can state with authority, who knows?

This change apparently went into effect a few months ago without any announcement from the MPAA. And when I finally noticed it, I searched the Web for some explanation.

The closest I came is an official e-mail gobbledygook response by MPAA vice president for corporate communications Elizabeth Kaltman to "Movie Mom" Nell Minow (blog.beliefnet.com/moviemom/):