Curses!

Searching for a book at the Los Feliz library recently, Ruzielle Andrade was distracted by the voice of a 10-year-old girl sitting nearby. The girl idly poked at the keyboard of a reference computer while she talked to a boy hovering over her shoulder.

“I’m gonna kick some major ass,” she said. Then the girl, her shiny black hair combed straight back and a grin spread across her oval face, launched into a barrage of expletives that sounded more like the pre-show boasts of a gangster rapper than the after-school chat of a fifth-grader.

Andrade, a 21-year-old college student, couldn’t believe it.

“When I was her age, I got in trouble if I said ‘hell,’ ” she said. “And here’s this little girl, just going off.”

At bus stops and coffee shops, banks and ballparks, at work and at play, cursing has become a part of everyday language.

Cursing, of course, is nothing new. As long as people have stubbed their toes, played golf or gotten drunk, they have invoked the names of holy figures, private acts and other unmentionables. What is new is the casual, common and public use of obscenity. Expressions that might have drawn cold stares 20 years ago now are mere conversational filler. One study of everyday speech reported in the book “Cursing in America” says that about 8% of people’s average work vocabulary consists of swear words. In leisure conversations, the crude word count climbs to 13%.

And it’s not just kids toying with forbidden phrases. Linguists say obscenities once associated with sailors and soldiers now spice up the public conversations of executives and housewives.

Alarmed by the surge of trash talk, anti-cursing crusaders are making various attempts to clean up public language. In Michigan, a 25-year-old man recently was convicted of violating a 101-year-old law for shouting a string of profanities after tumbling out of a canoe. In Oklahoma City, city officials have pledged to uphold an anti-obscenity law and to broadcast offenders’ mug shots on public-access television. And in Illinois, a reformed curser who calls himself “the dean of clean” has established the Cuss Control Academy, a school to advocate restraint as a way to a more civilized society.

(In Los Angeles, foul language is not specifically forbidden. Mike Qualls, a spokesman for the city attorney, says the last time anyone was prosecuted for cursing was in 1969.)

But swearing is everywhere, says Timothy Jay, a professor of psychology at North Adams State College in Massachusetts and author of four books on obscenity, including “Cursing in America.”

“We’re exposed to it everywhere, on the radio and the Internet, in television and movies,” Jay said. “Everything has swear words now. As consumers of language, you can’t help pick it up,” he said.

For example, Dick Brett, a 64-year-old retired social worker, says he doesn’t generally see R-rated films or listen to shock jock comics. But he knows the latest nasty idioms, thanks to regular lunches at the Sizzler restaurant near a Pasadena church where he volunteers. Unlike the indelicate language in videos or on TV, you can’t press the mute button on the potty mouths at the next booth.

“People rattle off the big curse words one after another,” he said. “I don’t think they mean anything by it. They just curse for the lack of anything better to say.”

And you don’t have to leave home to hear it. Gideon Brower, a screenwriter, says he has become accustomed to being awakened in his Santa Monica apartment by the colorful language of drywall installers.

“These guys stand right outside my window and curse up a storm,” he said. “It’s like waking up in a Scorsese film.”

At Farmers Insurance, a 71-year-old company that still maintains a strict dress code, managers have noted the gradual increase in cursing.

“Maybe because of the loosening of standards in social settings, a lot of times people won’t realize that the language they’re using is offensive,” said Robin Buendia, human resource services manager at Farmers’ headquarters in Los Angeles. Farmers doesn’t have a specific anti-obscenity policy, but most inappropriate language is covered by the company’s stringent policies on harassment.

“If one of our employees feels uncomfortable with language someone is using, they can come straight to us,” Buendia said. “We’re pretty conservative, and we put out the message that everyone is free to work in an environment that’s free of harassment or intimidation. Even if it’s something you’d naturally say in your home life, it’s not appropriate in the work place.”

Psychology professor Jay has recorded conversations of kids at camp, workers in mail rooms, students in cafeterias, pedestrians on street corners, even customers at Kmart. His language-tracking studies show that the use of obscenity is no longer related to class or level of education, he said. The biggest increase has been recorded among two groups: children and women.

While cussing has long been a right of passage for kids entering adolescence, profanity has become routine on and off the schoolyard. A full 52% of teenagers say that cursing is “in,” according to a 1998 study by Teenage Research Unlimited. And most young people have a drastically different definition of obscenity than that of their parents. Fans of “South Park,” “Beavis and Butthead” and TV-radio shock jock Howard Stern simply hear cursing differently--if they notice it at all--than those raised on “The Brady Bunch” or “Ozzie and Harriet.”

But children also sometimes become the family’s language cop. Bobby Slayton, a comedian whose act is chock-full of four-letter words, says he is frequently chided by his 11-year-old daughter for bringing his work home.

“She catches me, and I have to apologize,” he said. “I just don’t think cursing is such a big deal. I let her know it’s not the worst thing in the world to do.

“As long as you recycle, eat dolphin-safe tuna and get the hell out of the left lane when someone’s trying to pass you, if there is a heaven, that’s where you’re going.”

Guillermo Carranza, who works behind the counter of a Sunset Boulevard copy shop, says he is amazed by how many customers--men and women alike--deal with jammed printers and smudged photocopies by cursing like crazy.

“It trips me out that they use all this foul language all the time over something so stupid,” said Carranza, 19. “If it keeps going like it’s going now, there’s going to be dirt coming out every time anyone opens their mouth. I don’t want my kids coming up like that. I’m going to teach them how to express themselves without using foul language.”

The desire to polish up public appearances prompted an Illinois public relations consultant, Jim O’Connor, to give up cursing cold turkey. O’Connor didn’t have a religious conversion or moral revelation; he says he simply wanted to eliminate a habit he feared made him seem crude and inconsiderate.

“We have a tendency to assume that if you swear, nobody’s going to mind,” he said. “But I’ve found that that’s not true. People may not say anything, but they’re either offended or they just don’t have the respect for you that you’d like them to have.”

Soon after cleaning up his own language, O’Connor established the Cuss Control Academy to coach others in techniques he calls “Tips for Taming Your Tongue.” In weekend classes and lectures to schools and civic groups, O’Connor outlines methods for managing anger and provides lists of sanitized alternatives for common curses.

“When you say ‘nuts,’ ‘rats’ or ‘phooey,’ you may not feel like you’re expressing as much anger or frustration,” he said. “But we really need to look at why we have to express that emotion so frequently to begin with. Accidents happen, people make mistakes, traffic is part of driving. But we just keep getting more hostile, more aggressive, more abrasive and more belligerent.”

So to O’Connor, curbing cursing is akin to fighting crime by ticketing vandals and loiterers--fix the little things and you prevent the big things from ever happening.

“It’s not just the words, it’s the attitude behind the words,” he said. “When you swear, you can start to feel like the world is unfair. . . . It’s just negativeness.”

Others say cutting curse words would do nothing to make life fundamentally cheerier.

“Words express what we feel--and because we’re angry people, we’re sexual people, we have a language that expresses those things,” Jay said. “Swear words simply do things that other words don’t.”

Swearing is “built into most Americans,” he says, “like horns in cars.”

And sometimes, you’ve just got to honk. The 10-year-old girl whose rant astonished library patrons told Andrade that she does not intend to stop swearing in public or anywhere else.

Leaning against a chair with a fist planted on her hip, she said that she’s sorry she offended people around her but that she doesn’t understand why swearing is such a big deal.

“My dad tells me not to swear, but I don’t care,” she said. “People just get me mad.”