Well I'll be darned. Check out two stories that came out of California on the same day last week.

One examined the phenomenon of Hollywood's profanity-laden movie trailers that feature younger and younger characters using very bad language. Made expressly to promote films via the uncensored Internet, they are all the rage among tweens and teens who have little trouble getting around the age restrictions for online viewing.

The other story was about California lawmakers proposing to turn the beginning of March into an annual Cuss Free Week, during which time people would be encouraged to speak "like you're at your grandma's house."

My first thoughts came in quick succession. Is the California legislature planning to shut down the entire entertainment industry the first week of March, not to mention the political process, which can use perfectly chaste words and still be obscene? What, exactly, is so terrible about the trailer featured in the article? And aren't these people making a lot of assumptions about grandmas?

Wisely, as it turns out, the legislators are not proposing any enforcement mechanism. Cuss Free Week would be a voluntary statement in opposition to the coarsening of the public square. The hope is that if people have reason to think about it, they'll resist the urge to utter the nasty words that, in many cases, have become all too common in everyday speech.

Gosh, I thought, politeness as public policy. Good luck with that. Then again, New York did it with cab drivers, so what the heck?

As for the trailer, I thought I'd better see if it's really all that appalling. I'm a mom, after all. And even though my daughter is now a college student who pretty much runs her own life, I remember like it was yesterday my refusal to let her see a couple of movies because she was too young for the subject matter.

Of course, she saw them anyway at a friend's house. I doubt there was any lasting damage. But if she were 10 years old today, how would I feel about her sitting at a computer, taking in all these "red band" trailers (as opposed to the green-band ones shown in TV ads and theaters) that feature dialogue too profane or shocking to merit a more general rating?

It took about 10 seconds to track down the red-band trailer in question. The film is about some normal teens who decide to become super heroes, their lack of super powers notwithstanding. Its title, and I'm sorry about this, is "Kick-Ass," which is the name one of the kids gives himself.

According to The New York Times, the trailer has a terrible awful no good quote from a sweet-faced girl who's about 13 that has a lot of adults up in arms. Oh • &#%, I thought. Another step back toward the primordial slime.

Except the trailer made me laugh. It even made me want to see the movie. And the nasty quote from the sweet-faced girl? It was gratuitous, all right. Gratuitously dumb, and just the kind of thing to make kids hoot, holler and repeat ad nauseam. I doubt it will do any lasting damage.

To the extent that language in film affects language in real life, you'd have to chalk this up as a negative influence, but only one of many. And as with everything else, it falls to parents to let kids know what's acceptable and what isn't.

It's a powerful tide to be bucking, and it often feels like a losing battle, but somehow, most kids seem to grow up realizing where cussing does and does not belong. With friends and peers -- OK, or even required, depending on one's cohorts. With parents, teachers and adults in general -- not. On job or college interviews -- totally not. And if they don't know that last one going in, they'll surely know it going out.

I'm hardly one to talk. Sad to say, I developed quite a colorful vocabulary at college -- if profane gerunds used as all-purpose adjectives can be considered colorful. I was by no means alone in this. Many of us were slinging these words around without a second thought. Even some professors were doing it, not always to the desired effect.

The young men who'd gone to Vietnam returned swearing a blue streak, but they had good reason. For the rest of us, it was more of a generational badge. Looking back, it's kind of embarrassing, but no more embarrassing than wide-wale corduroy hip-huggers.

It didn't take long to realize that neither one was going to get us very far in the real world. But where pants can be tossed away, language habits are harder to break. You reach first for the words you're accustomed to using.

Casual cussing is lazy and imprecise, and it doesn't say much for your discipline or mastery of ideas. Worse, it robs the words of their power.

I remember a friend who accidentally spilled a pile of books in the dorm lobby. She let out a one-word epithet that captured her frustration as no other word could. After a shocked silence, everyone burst out laughing, then rushed to help her pick up the mess. A year later, the same word barely would have registered.

Maybe I should be worried about red-band trailers and the films they come from. But I'm more concerned with a different speech pattern. I'll take one good [expletive] over the word "like" inserted six times in every sentence, hands down. And so, by the way, would my late grandma, Nana, who was known to utter a mild swear word on rare occasions, but only when she really meant it.

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