It wasn’t much, as Scrabble words go, but sometimes it’s enough to blow four letters out of your rack, grab a few points, and hope for something better out of the bag.

I put down the “F,” the “U,” the “C”. . .

“Hey,” protested my 14-year-old son. “No swears!”

Being vastly familiar with the Official Scrabble Rules, I happen to know that there is no such ban on obscenity, provided of course the offensive word isn’t capitalized or hyphenated.

But there was something so charmingly schoolyard in his reaction, in the phrase “No swears!” that, sighing, I gathered up my letters and contemplated anew the unpromising alphabet soup jumble before me.

Ironically, while the whiff of childishness settled the matter on the Scrabble board, it is exactly what has always set me against the construction “the n-word.” I hate using it, when discussing matters of language and race, of parents trying to ban Huck Finn, and such.

For years, I’d use the full six-letter slur, or try to, under the reasoning that while the term is painful when, oh, hurled on a school playground, we are all adults here, and no child would cry himself to sleep at night because a newspaper columnist mentioned a bad word while discussing “Porgy and Bess.”

But I kept losing that battle, and now, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid profusely apologizing for having used the word “Negro,” it seems the etymological sands have shifted yet again, and that “Negro” — while still printable in discussions such as this one, as opposed to, well, that other word — has entered the realm of the Words You Can’t Say.

Not that I ever did. “Negro” fell out as a term of art in the 1960s, replaced by “black,” a word thought to reflect greater pride. I didn’t use “Negro,” not because I was sensitive, God knows, but because I was young, the same way I wouldn’t call a refrigerator an “icebox” or a radio a “wireless.”

That “Negro” is not just old-fashioned, but offensive, is a little surprising, enough that I checked. Sure enough, “sometimes offensive” in the online Merriam-Webster, and “dated often offensive” in the nameless Dictionary floating on the desktop of my iMac.

What that means, in practical terms, is it’s OK embedded in the organizations that still use it — the United Negro College Fund and whatever — but if you say, “the Negro children were eating ice cream,” — it would brand you as somewhat out-of-touch, though anyone actually being offended seems something of a stretch.

Then again, being offended over word choice always struck me as a rather low rung of political activity.

Some groups spend considerable time parsing vocabulary, in a constant race to keep words associated with themselves from carrying a negative connotation. (Often a futile race, as anyone knows who ever heard the heavy tone of mockery and derision that a schoolchild can freight upon the word “special.” They might as well have stuck with “retarded.”)

Then again, I’m from a subgroup so reviled that our proper name, “Jew,” can be used as a lower case derogatory verb (”to jew”) which, I can report from experience, is a legal Scrabble word as opposed to “Negro,” which, in addition to its other drawbacks, is capitalized, and thus not allowed.

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