The cuss jar

This is cute:

PORTAGE -- You'd better not say "#$%^&" or even "!*$)+" in the Portage clerk-treasurer's office.

The use of off-color language could cost you a pretty penny, or a quarter -- or even $1.50 if the word's deemed foul enough.

The employees in the City Hall office have been fining themselves -- and visitors -- since July for using curse words.

We had the equivalent of a "cuss jar" when I was growing up; it was called "Mom and Dad." Though we cursed up a storm around our friends, our parents' disapproval (or more) kept our language clean around the house. We always suspected our parents were the same -- that they likely let loose with a few expletives around other adults but kept it clean around the house for the kids' sake.

My suspicions were confirmed about my father when I saw him hit his thumb with a hammer one time, and he let loose with what they would call a $1.50 word in Portage. That was so shocking that I brooded over it for weeks, and I suspect he did, too. My father hadn't done anything outrageously wrong, except momentarily forget where he was and break our unwritten contract.

That sense of something being right in some places and wrong in others -- some would call it hypocrisy -- is one of the civilizing touches we have lost to a vulgar popular culture that allows anything anywhere.