Who killed civility? Seventies commercials.

I don't remember quite so far back as the commercials where people called friends from the drugstore, asking what they'd recommend for "occasional irregularity", but I remember ones that were nearly as contrived. After all, that's what it takes to launch characters into an intense conversation about the qualities of some product. You need to make them say something people in real life would never say.

By the early seventies, what set a lot of commercials' dialogue apart from real talk was its plain old rudeness.

Three words: Ancient Chinese secret.

Does anyone old enough not remember the laundry owner's wife, a small Asian woman with a voice that seemed too big for her, blowing her husband's cover in front of a customer by bellowing, "We need more Calgon!"?

Then there was the aged woman who, coming back from a shopping trip with her granddaughter, whined to the kid's mother: "If I'm wrong, it's Lisa's fault. She said buy Cling-Free."

And there was one that began with the end of some community theater production. The star, in 1890's costume, bounces offstage into her dressing room to be greeted by a frumpy attendant: Her volunteer dresser, or maybe her understudy. The woman's manner is cringing, but her words are an insult: "Diane, before the party, do you want to use my mouthwash?"

Poor Diane, about to be humiliated at her moment of triumph because she used the wrong alcohol-based solution (or none at all!) to rinse her mouth. But that's not how it plays out. Diane is not hurt at all, her confidence is unshaken, because, as she explains, she uses a long-lasting brand whose name I've completely forgotten.

Is she deluded in trusting it? No, because some guy appears and starts smooching with her, perhaps as a way of putting the dresser in her place.

So why did the dresser make the offer in the first place? Only so that Diane, who could not reasonably be expected to have such things on her mind, could make her mouthwash pitch. In real life, nothing, from the first line onward, would've been uttered.

My generation grew up watching this kind of . . . stuff. While our parents worried that we might be damaged by the violence on reruns of The High Chaparral, we took in the message that this was the way grownups talked to and about the people close to them.

So. If I'm rude, it's the commercials' fault.