If you read this digest regularly, you know my essays tend to cluster around topics in the arts, history, language, and culture. Today, though, I have a question about technology, albeit a weird one. Still, I hope someone can answer it.

The question concerns something distressing that happens using the voice-recognition feature for creating text on cell phones. Why do ordinary words so often generate inappropriate or obscene words? (We’re talking the kinds of word that caused my mother to wash our mouths out with soap.)

Is it just to me this happens? Are my speech patterns really that provocative? Or could there be a hidden app on my phone called “Up Your Level of Obscenities”?

Perhaps the cumulative effect of our Holy Week liturgies has triggered me to ask this question. Crudeness seems doubly intolerable after an emersion in beautiful, meaningful experiences. Rather than simply whispering it, today’s societal baseness screams its ugliness.

I am not claiming to have a 100% pure record from my own mouth. In fact, I confess to resembling the mother attempting to fix the toilet in the charming children’s book The Very Inappropriate Word (2013, Jim Tobin, author; Dave Coverly, illustrator). Do you know it? In the story, a second-grader named Michael loves words. He collects new words, even stuffing them into his drawers and under his bed (along with candy wrappers).

In truth, he has heard inappropriate words before (reference the mom above). Still, one day he hears an inappropriate word from a big kid on the school bus (shown as #$%^&*). He puts this word in his pocket and shyly shows it to his older sister who roundly condemns him (“Michael, that is a very inappropriate word!”). Still, he tries it out on the playground, whereupon his classmates seize it, as kids do. The word then pops up in class.

When the teacher hears it and finds out who brought it to school, she wisely decides on a different kind of punishment for young Michael. She keeps him in after school and asks him to collect new words for the class’ vocabulary lists. She leads him into a library (wonderfully illustrated) and leaves him to dig in.

Michael pulls out tons of fabulous words. He is allowed to stack them in a wagon and take them home. Not surprisingly, the problematic “inappropriate” word has lost its charm. It falls out of his back pocket and is discovered by a puppy who playfully drags it home to his doggie-momma, quickly to find himself roundly chastised!

We no longer live in a world where a teacher’s ire can change a child’s verbal behavior easily, nor will every teacher dare to try. Still, as educators, parents and grandparents, aunties and uncles, family friends, and neighbors, we have a clear responsibility to help children identify and weed out the torrents of awful words that dominate our ugly popular culture. Many kids have no idea how to replace these monstrosities with effective words that do a better job of making whatever point the garbage-words were supposed to make.

And that really is the trick, isn’t it? Education is supposed to lead and uplift. It should put better tools and resources at a child’s disposal. Certainly, in many sectors of the Educational Renewal, the art of Rhetoric is undergoing a revival. Verbal persuasion, and the intricacies of the written and spoken languages that once routinely graced the classroom and the dinner table still have their power.

But meanwhile, back to my opening point, why does this unwanted verbal transformation  happen on my phone? What can I do to stop a lazily uttered noun in the question“Are they at the beach?” from sprouting into an offensive one? Explain to me why, when I say “she may not. . . ,” my phone thinks I’m swearing.

Here’s one possibility. I’ve conjured up the image of an evil thirteen-year-old genius-son  of the programmer who created voice-recognition. This kid lifts his brainy head and says : “Hey dad, wouldn’t it be cool to make sonorous ambiguities default to bad words!?”

When you write to tell me I have lost my mind, at least offer me a solution for disabling the potty-mouth feature in my phone. Of course, I can redouble my efforts to enunciate better, but, frankly, that does not always fix the problem.

Or, I could simply stop using voice-recognition, despite the fact that it does facilitate my professional communications while I’m on the move. People once managed professional communications with fountain pens and typewriters, right? Using those technological systems, there was no ambiguity as to where the fault for inappropriate language lay.

Maybe Siri knows the answer.