Out of the Mouths of Babes : Curses! Kids learn to swear early via music, movies--and even Mom.

The F-word, the S-word and a veritable thesaurus of lesser expletives spew from the mouths of actors, shock jocks, rock stars and athletes. And--apologies to Cole Porter--good authors who once knew better words now only use four-letter words.

In times of stress even Mom and Dad may cuss among the best--so is it any wonder that some kids not yet out of grade school swear like sailors?

“It’s a pattern,” says Wayne Langham, principal of Rosemont Avenue Elementary School on the fringes of downtown L. A.

Diana Hamilton, a second-grade teacher at Rosemont, agrees: “They’re all using the words--and they’re very nice children.”

Langham says that if he followed the letter of the law and expelled kids who use profanity, “I wouldn’t have any students.”

“It’s society,” observes Brenda Mingo, director of the Ebony Learning Tree on Slauson Avenue, where she has preschoolers through sixth-graders. She says little kids pick it up from big kids, for whom it is “just regular talk.”

But, if a child consistently uses foul language, she adds, it’s time to find out what’s going on at home: “Some kids don’t hear anything but, ‘Get your blank over here.’ They almost think that’s their name.”

The language blares from home video rentals, from rap and heavy metal CDs. Parents--and kids--wear T-shirts emblazoned with obscenities. At school, they are asked to turn those shirts inside out.

What can parents--and teachers--do?

Monet Brock, a Rosemont teacher, recalls a student reporting, “Miss Brock, someone used the F-word.” Brock, unfazed, replied, “Fireman? Farmer? Fantastic?” The child decided the teacher was hopelessly nerdy and the incident passed.

Most experts agree that the best strategy is not to overreact--explain that this is gutter language and that some words are unacceptable because they may offend or hurt someone.

Kids will bring to school what they hear at home. Langham points out, “We have parents less than 18 who have kids in kindergarten.” Those parents use words that would have made their grandparents blush.

Rosemont teacher Hamilton says, “I hear a lot of ‘kick my asses.’ They don’t see it as vulgar.”

If she hears an obscenity, Hamilton may ask, “Do you eat with the same mouth that dirt comes out of?”

“There’s no way that we can stop the onrush of language change,” says John Regan, professor of education at Claremont Graduate School. “Inexorably onward, or downward, it goes.”

He sees a flicker of hope: “You get to a stage where words have drained themselves of their meaning or power and they just drop away . . . maybe they die of their own exhaustion.”

Meanwhile, he says, young people are going to mimic the speech of the people they like and want to be like--including celebrities.

Once, four-letter words were taboo in “nice” homes. Young men might pick up the lingo in the military, Regan notes, and “there used to be lots of stories about going home and forgetting where you were and asking someone to pass the ‘f------ salt.’ ”

Today that word can be heard on almost any school playground. Is it possibly on the road to acceptability?

Regan, in reply, paraphrases the Marquis de Sade: There’s nothing so abhorrent that it cannot become, with frequency, simply the bizarre.

Loeb Aronin, head of psychological counseling services for L. A. Unified Schools, places part of the blame on the profanity explosion in the home.

Bad language is “just another piece” of the pattern in a society where, increasingly, economic stress, family instability and transient lifestyles chip away at youngsters’ self-esteem.

Pre-adolescent swearing crosses socioeconomic lines. Mom and Dad may be too busy, or too stressed out, to really hear what kids are saying. TV may be the baby-sitter.

When he was a boy, Aronin observes, “We had a lot of John Waynes walking around.” Today, the role model is more apt to be Madonna or Ice-T.

While a vast vocabulary of four-letter words might stultify language development, and obscenity must be dealt with in an appropriate manner, schools face far greater problems, Aronin says.

In post-riot Los Angeles, a lot of kids might have come to school swearing either in anger or frustration: “Their local grocery store doesn’t exist anymore. Or maybe the kid’s been burned out of his house,” Aronin says.

Cathryn Berger Kaye, a children’s book author and former teacher who heads StarServe, an organization promoting school-based community service programs, says, “We rush our children to be exposed to either violence or something that’s very sophisticated.”

She has two young daughters at P. S. 1, a private school in Santa Monica.

When the older, Ariel, was about 6, Berger Kaye recalls, the child said bitch in company. Later, in a one-on-one, Berger Kaye determined that the child had no idea what it meant.

Berger Kaye explained that it is a female dog, but also a word used to “hurt people’s feelings.” And she told her she should use only words she understood. “She seemed to really get that. That really stopped it.”

When possible, she tries to give the child options for expressing herself such as “Oh, great mashed potatoes!” a phrase a cousin used to vent frustration.

She says her younger child, Devora, has “come out with some priceless gems now and then.” If the bad word is totally out of context, Berger Kaye will “let it ride.”

“They want to try words on like people try on clothes.”

She laughs as she recalls Ariel, at 18 months, watching a football game on TV with her father. When the good guys fumbled, he blurted, “Oh, s---, the football!” Much later, Ariel brought her mother a newspaper picture of a football game, and repeated her father’s outburst, word for word.

Berger Kaye tries to curb her own language, but “not all the way. I think kids need to hear the real world.”

In L. A.’s public schools, immigrant youngsters pick up English swear words before knowing their meaning. Very early on, “The ‘big F’ comes up,” says Rene Urbina, a teacher’s assistant and playground supervisor at Rosemont. It’s a way of gaining acceptance. (Spanish-speaking kids add a few choice words of their own to round out their bilingual vocabulary.)

Profanity among the young is not gender-exclusive. “The girls use it the same way the boys do,” says Rosemont principal Langham. “I’ve had some who were worse.”

Kids’ language reflects societal upheaval.

Says Langham, “We have 12-year-olds here who’ve been pregnant. All the kids know everything. They may live two or three families to a room. Sometimes there’s been too much beer or wine on the weekend and the fights go on. They hear all the language.”

Brad Albion, who works with potential dropouts at Rosemont, adds, “You’d be amazed how many kids say their fathers get drunk and beat their mothers up. You know those kids are being exposed to profanity. They see an angry person using it as a powerful word and they use it when they’re angry.”

Even the most foul-mouthed kids learn quickly, though, that swearing isn’t tolerated in the classroom.

At Topanga Montessori Preschool, assistant director Manuela Raffler says, “We have the problem for a week or two” with new pupils. But “we’ve found pretty good ways to teach our children that it’s not OK. We talk a lot about feelings--how would you feel if somebody said a bad word to you?”

Adds Hamilton: “It’s a rite of passage. You’ve got to try it just to know what it feels like.”