Watch Your Mouth

Coarse, gross, crass, indelicate, vulgar, obscene, ribald. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, these adjectives primarily describe offensive speech or writing and behavior.

Coarse implies roughness and crudeness in manners, appearance, or expression and a lack of delicacy and refinement.

Gross implies excessive behavior approaching bestiality.

Crass suggests stupidity combined with rudeness or other manifestation of lack of refinement, as in crass ignorance.

Indelicate implies immodesty, tactless behavior, or lack of taste in expression, as in an indelicate remark.

Vulgar emphasizes offensiveness to propriety and suggests commonness, boorishness and poor breeding. It is associated with the great masses of people as distinguished from the educated or cultivated classes.

Obscene strongly stresses lewdness or indecency, particularly in reference to accepted standards of morality, decency or modesty.

Ribald implies vulgar, coarse, off-color language or behavior intended to provoke laughter.

The word profanity is often applied to all these forms of improper language but, strictly speaking, to be profane is to show contempt, irreverence or abusive disrespect for sacred things by word or deed. (The term blasphemy is reserved to describe profane utterances about God.)

It is unfortunate that the "accepted standards" are changing, even among the "educated or cultivated classes." And the standards seem to be headed downward.

Still, it will always be possible to make a distinction between "classy" and "trashy." The problem is, classy can be elitist, repressive and hypocritical, while trashy can be tolerant, liberating, and genuine.

And to be honest, there is a certain farm-related vulgarity that has no equal for describing intolerable nonsense.