A tale of two women and four letters.

The first of them (the women, I mean) was an older lady who was telling me a riveting story about a vacation that had gone amok. We were sitting at her kitchen table over cups of coffee and she told the story well. Near the end of it, when things were getting really out of hand, she fired off a four-letter word with the grace and skill of a trained archer.

It was a special moment. The foul word hung in the air, seeming to echo off the oven, the refrigerator and the walls with warm messages such as “Kiss the Cook” or “My Special Ingredient is Love” written in needlepoint.

“I’m sorry, dear,” she said, leaning across the table and putting her hand on mine. “Sometimes I cuss when I get excited.”

Flash forward a few weeks. A mild, late-autumn afternoon in the Shaw’s parking lot on Lisbon Street. A much younger woman is stomping across the lot with a small boy in tow. And by “in tow” I mean just that. She has a hold on his hand and she’s pulling him along in such a way that his feet barely touch the ground. She is much more tender in the way she embraces her cellphone, which she holds just 3 inches from her face.

Halfway to her car, the young mother let loose such a string of profanity, I would have covered the ears of my motorcycle, if it had such things.

“Listen, you little #@!$#@,” she screeched at the boy. “I’m not going to put up with your #@#!#$ $#@!@# any more today. When we get home, you’re going straight to your #$#@# room and going to $#@!@# bed!”

And then, in case the boy didn’t understand that his momma was angry, she uttered one more dirty word — one of the really bad ones — with particular volume and force.

“#!*$#@!”

I hate to use those exotic symbols, readers, but what are you going to do? Some words I wouldn’t sneak into the paper even if I thought I could get away with it, and this picture of class and motherhood sprayed the parking lot with them like birdshot.

Which leads elegantly to my point, one I’ve made many times before and will make again: There is a right way and a wrong way to cuss.

The older woman with her tale of vacation woe did it in such a way that Mark Twain would have been pleased. She didn’t cuss just for the sake of cussing. She was MOVED to those four-letter words by the rising thrill of her story.

When that four-piece bit of profanity escaped her lips, it did so at just the right time and in just the right way. It was so perfectly in context that it enhanced her story rather than cheapening it.

When a person swears in such a way, it serves as an exclamation point, or a razor-sharp adjective where no other adjectives will do. Samuel L. Jackson knows this. So did Twain, so does Denis Leary, although in my experience, it is usually the older folks who know how to do it the right way.

The woman in the parking lot? Her license to swear ought to be yanked and never given back. She abused the privilege, going about it in such a way that violated almost every rule of swearing: She did it in a public place. She did it in front of her own child and possibly others. She placed her swear words haphazardly, with no consideration for context or finesse. And she did it loudly, which is OK only in a situation where you have stubbed your toe, pounded your thumb with a hammer or crashed shin-first into a coffee table.

Or, you know. Anything involving your boy parts.

Mark Twain said, “There ought to be a room in every house to swear in,” which nicely reflects my philosophy on the subject.

I swear plenty, but it’s usually in response to pain or aggravation. At the newspaper, there’s a small room at the back of the building I use for this purpose. When there are 2 measly inches of snow in the forecast and an editor assigns an advance weather story, I go into that room and swear at the filing cabinets. “A #@!# weather story? For two #@!@#@ inches of snow? Are you out of your #@!@# minds?”

The other night, I was trying to secure something to a wall using a drill and a common wood screw. I was working in a very confined space and every time I thought I had the screw lined up, it would kick to the side and the drill bit would spear into my thumb like a fang. Swear? Oh, yes. I swore with such red-hot rage that it set a portion of the wall on fire and I no longer had to worry about hanging something there.

If there had been kids or senior citizens in the room, I would have forgone the swearing, expressing my rage by chewing a hole in the Sheetrock or something. I like to think that this sets me apart from the woman in the parking lot. I also think that if I keep practicing, I might someday find the ability to turn profanity into poetry, like the old woman with the vacation story and the needlepoint. (Wouldn’t it be awesome if she hung stitchery on the wall bearing the message @!#$!@?

They say there’s a storm coming, a couple inches of snow as we creep toward Christmas. Snow in December isn’t newsworthy, but I can hear the editors mumbling in their little coven on the other side of the room. They’re mulling a weather story, I just know it. I’ll get practice in the fine art of swearing, all right.

Plenty of @#!#$ practice.

Mark LaFlamme is a #@!&% Sun Journal staff writer. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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