At the tender age of 17 I joined the U.S. Marine Corps. As a young man in Oklahoma, I learned my fair share of four-letter words. After all, I had been partially raised on a farm and around a lot of my Dad's friends who were truck drivers, bus drivers and rodeo performers. I didn't think there was a single, solitary cuss word that I hadn't heard. But I was wrong!

When I went to boot camp I was introduced to two sergeants and a corporal who had raised the art of speaking with profane words so that it seemed like they were using another language entirely. It's not that they had invented any new cuss words, but they were certainly experts at using them in a wide variety of applications. As you probably know, most profane words can serve as a noun or a verb, and many can be converted into adjectives and adverbs with the use of suffixes and prefixes. I honestly believe that these non-commissioned officers could make up an entire sentence using only profane words and it would somehow make sense. But they were novices compared to the real expert I met soon after.

My platoon sergeant in my outfit after boot camp was a gunnery sergeant who reportedly had been the first Marine to go over the wall at Pusan Harbor in the Korean War. He was a bona-fide hero with a chest full of medals. We in the platoon both loved and feared him intensely. His use of profanity was legendary.

One evening after my platoon had performed miserably during an exercise, he entered our barracks and commanded our attention. Over the course of 15 minutes he delivered a speech about performance, pride and responsibility that was so elegant it was literally laced with profanity. When he spun on his heel to exit our barracks, I thought, “I wish I could speak so powerfully.” He had humiliated and motivated us at the same time. But his choice of language would no doubt have badly insulted his brother, reportedly a Catholic monsignor.

All of this cussing prepared me for the first time I sat at a firehouse dining table. The language was as purple as anything I had heard in my platoon, although it wasn't quite as eloquent. In fact, most of it seemed to be feeble attempts at humor and expressions of angst over something going on within the organization. But profane it was. It was an acceptable form of language, however. The choice of words didn't raise a single eyebrow.

That may not be true today. Can an individual or an organization get into trouble today as a result of using profanity? Is it possible that profanity exists within most firehouses in this country? Is it possible that specific people will be offended by the use of profanity? Is it possible that there's a personal or professional liability in the use of profanity? Could profanity damage a personal relationship? Might individuals feel that the use of certain words is directed at them personally?

Let's make it simple. The answer to all of these questions is likely to be yes in our contemporary society.

But are firefighters going to discontinue the use of profane language? Are there going to be times in which anger or frustration results in the use of profanity? Is it possible that you can be cursed at in another language and not understand it? Is it possible that a word you take for granted as part of your vocabulary could be interpreted differently by another individual? Can a fire department effectively rule out the use of profane language in the firehouse? Can the use of profanity in one context be appropriate and in a similar context be totally inappropriate?

That is a tougher exam to take. Frankly, I won't answer these questions because they are influenced by the organization, the individuals and interpersonal relationships within that organization, and the antecedent conditions that created the organization's culture. In other words, some of you will answer those questions one way and some will answer them another.

That variety of answers speaks to the issue of “community standards.” Imagine for just a moment these guests at a firehouse dinner: a local priest, the head of the American Civil Liberties Union, the president of the Junior Women's Club, and George Carlin. Whose standard would you apply to the conversation and discourse of the evening?

Today we live in an environment where young children hear and see things on television that I was denied access to until I had left home and joined the service. I have actually heard language come out of a 6-year-old child that can almost match my two drill instructors in boot camp. You see things on TV today that were declared to be pornography not too many years ago. So how do we determine whether the use of rude, obnoxious and risqué language fits into operating a fire department or fire company today?

Sorry! I'm not going to tell you. No, instead I'm going to raise the bar on discussing appropriate and inappropriate behaviors in our current legal and moral environment. If you haven't thought about this before, you are already behind the learning curve. Ignoring this will not make it go away. To the contrary, acting as if this problem doesn't exist creates a greater potential that it will crop up whenever circumstances are correct.

It goes without saying that we can't legislate morality in the firehouse, but we certainly can consider the consequence of specific behaviors that result in anger, anxiety or hostility. We need to deal with the issue of inappropriate behavior overall.

One thing to keep in mind is that an organization can be held responsible for the creation of a hostile workplace. What determines whether a fire station is a hostile workplace? It exists when people feel uncomfortable, unsettled or singled out negatively. Any behavior that focuses on an individual's sense of loss as a member of a team or organization is often interpreted as hostile.

Interestingly, the best place to begin discussing this topic is around the dining room table at the fire company level. I won't be foolish enough to recommend that you can bring people together and order them not to speak in a certain fashion or use specific words as expressions of their feelings. But I think it's entirely reasonable to engage a fire company in the dialogue of what makes people feel like members of an operating team.

Going back to the early days of my fire service career, I remember sitting at the dining room table with one of my captains. He very carefully and very effectively laid out his expectations to us as crew members. I can distinctly remember one of his admonitions. He emphasized that we must learn to respect each other. He reinforced that statement by saying we were to be hard on our problems but soft on our people. He made it very clear that disrespectful or malicious exchanges would not be tolerated in his presence. I don't recall him ever saying anything about the use of profanity, but his message was pretty clear.

After that conversation I'm quite sure that I along with others may have said things in humor which violated that sense of constraint, yet we never ended up with negative interpersonal relationships in that fire company. Moreover, belonging to that particular captain's company help shape my perspective on how to interact with other peers as my career developed.

After dealing with personnel issues and witnessing the changes in the fire service over four decades, I have clearly seen a change in expectations around the dining room table. Diversity has arrived at the firehouse, even if it still has some way to go. Whether anyone wants to agree with it, the domain of the fire service has been modified by the introduction of new values and expectations by the diverse members of its work force.

Unfortunately, and a lot of people may not wish to admit this, but these new values don't always have a higher moral ground to stand on. For example, I was in a conversation once with a member of one of the newer groups of diversity in the fire service who bragged that “they could out-raunch the raunchiest.” This particular individual proved the point by telling a story that made even my face turn a little red.

The one thing we have to remember is that the firehouse is a public facility that should be based on a community standard and not a particular person's values. When we are in that firehouse we have an obligation to those citizens who are paying the bill for us to serve. It is my personal belief that individuals will probably choose to do exactly what they think they can get away with. Under some circumstances a person's behavior will never be held accountable, but down the road another individual will end up in a lawsuit over doing or saying the same thing. The choice is yours.

Every time you or a member of your staff chooses to use words that are deemed unacceptable by some component of society, you are vulnerable. If those words are charged with emotion and directed at another human being, the vulnerability increases significantly. If intervening supervisors don't see the warning signs of animosity and deal with it effectively, the vulnerability increases again by an order of magnitude. If an aggrieved person objects to how he or she is being treated and you don't deal with the issue immediately, the order of magnitude increases again significantly.

Gutter language can get you into court. There are numerous lawsuits that demonstrate this. I can almost guarantee you that the cost of defending these suits places a high premium on prevention as opposed to response.

I, for one, do not regret hearing the subtle nuances of profanity that verged on the poetic. Yet I am to this very day extremely careful of how I communicate with other individuals. We need to be more aware of the sensitivities that exist in our modern fire service.

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With more than 40 years in the fire service, Ronny J. Coleman has served as fire chief in Fullerton and San Clemente, Calif., and was the fire marshal of the State of California from 1992 to 1999. He is a certified fire chief and a master instructor in the California Fire Service Training and Education System. A Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers, he has an associate's degree in fire science, a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in vocational education.