Years ago one of our teens came home begging us to take in an exchange student for the year. Why we'd never even know he was here, she pleaded! You got that right, Kiddo, considering that there are already four of you and all of your friends lounging about the house and living in our refrigerator.

So with very little thought as to what we were actually undertaking, we brought in a young German boy to add to our burgeoning collection of 16-year-olds. The mere fact that he was gay and decided to come out publicly at our house that year didn't diminish the experience by much. No, I was not prepared for that. In fact it made us even more curious about other cultures and we began to invite young men and women to come and stay for a year or more. Let me say that we did move to college-aged kids because it seemed like less liability for us.

Our favorite exchange student came from Japan and he was and always will be an immediately connected member of our family. One of the things this young man wanted to do was to find out every single swear word in the English language. As a teacher I considered his request and decided there was a lesson to be taught here. Of course I would help him glean every last disgusting word I personally knew and I would help him research others outside my ken.

But don't think this was for the mere titillation of choosing curse words. I set the limits for the exercise. First our young man had to get a sturdy booklet and set it up by category. As we began to mull over the words we found, among others, that there were heaven sent curses in which one calls down God and His entire wrath upon an individual. Powerful!

Next came the bodily function words - those of the somewhat natural genre that described everything from nasal secretion to evacuation. There seemed no end to the potty/scatological expressions, but it was becoming clear that they would come in handy in certain discussions.

Male and female words are quite different from one another. Although genitalia not withstanding, there are so many words that could be applied only to a specific gender. And then we began to understand that there is indeed a third gender with all sorts of specific words as well. Each of these revelations brought with it a good opportunity to talk about issues...not such a bad thing for a youngster learning about the world in which he lives.

Expletives erupted on a page of their own. They might have been cross classified under other categories but for the quick, punchy one or two word blast, complete with exclamation point, these did deserve a category of their own.

Of course we did have a language barrier to overcome, but we persevered until our young man's notebook was dog-eared and overflowing. It was a successful project if I do say so myself. And, I might add, one that could benefit parents with teens who all of a sudden think peppering their sentences with all sorts of heretofore forbidden words is just plain cool.

Then came the day when our now multi-lingual and confident English as a second language speaker sought to incorporate some of his new words into his language. Woefully, snappy American cursing sounds just plain silly when it is heavily overlaid with a Japanese accept. While I am willing to remember how explicit the favored F word sounded when repeated endlessly in some current movies, it just didn't cut it out of the mouth of our kid.

Our next project was to fulfill his wish and to clean out the accent as well as we could while using the words in question. Again, it didn't seem smutty as much as it did like a session at school with the speech pathologist. It worked, of course, because our guy was definitely dedicated to doing some of his best work with this project. He pursued; he triumphed.

But all good things do come to an end, and after a few years, it was time for our young man to take all of his American education, his command of the language and his tattered book and head home to his native country. A new young lady, chaste and demure, had arrived to stay with us a few months earlier, and on his last day at our home, our now much older youngster solemnly handed over his book to our new girl. After all, he had committed what was necessary to memory. His final warning to her was to never use these words in casual language unless she could pronounce them correctly.

In the course of human relations and international friendship, I have come to believe that our project did a great deal to cement friendly relations for the next generation between Japan and America. And if that isn't so, at least I know that there is one man in Japan today who knows how to slip in an expletive without any trouble at all.