In a letter about the Portland mayor, one of our Mailbag correspondents used a derogatory term, which prompted several complaints.

Actually, it prompted quite a lot of agitated discussion on our online comment forum at

democratherald.com.

Normally we at the paper don't allow that kind of offending word to get through, but our filter against bad-mouthing is not 100 percent fail-safe. In this case the filterer, meaning me, thought the term had entered the mainstream of public discourse. But evidently not, and I regret this breach of standards that normally apply.

A couple of letter writers argued that the word still qualified as hate speech when used by the general public, though not necessarily when used by others, and therefore was off limits.

In the online forum, the reaction was quite a bit more agitated.

In the context of free speech, I hate to think that any words are off limits based only on the motive or outlook of the speaker. But we've been slipping down that slope for some time, and there seems to be no climbing back up.

As a general guideline for the Mailbag, it would be well to remember one simple rule of thumb:

Write the same way you would speak if you were in a conversation, face to face, with the person you write about.

This goes even if the person is a public figure far away, in some other town or on the national scene. And it applies especially when you feel moved to reply to what someone else has written in a letter that appears here.

When editing such responses, I try to guard against gratuitous personal insults.

It is certainly OK to attack what someone said, but it's not OK to attack the morals, upbringing or brains of the person who said it.

Sometimes there's a fine line between personal attack and merely disagreeing in strong terms with the previous message. Whether the line is crossed depends on whether the target of the criticism has thick skin or not. When not, I usually hear about it.

What we all should remember - and what we tend to forget all too often when we shoot off a letter to the paper or go online to let off steam - is that there is such a thing as manners.

You would not question a person's intelligence or call him an ugly name to his face, even if he was smaller than you and unarmed. So why do so in a public way?

Contrary to the general impression, manners are not a relic of the distant past, along with top hats and white gloves.

Seems to me that in unsettled times, as now, it's more important than ever to restrain our political passions by sticking with certain standards of public behavior and speech. This goes for letters to the Mailbag, for any other correspondence, and especially for the kind of online blogging that seems to occupy so much of people's energy and time.

You're invited to check out DH Today, the editor's weekday morning video message about the day's news at democratherald.com.