After all the philatelist and masticated e-mail I've gotten recently, I think I've become the titular, or at least crotchety, head of the Society for Words That Sound Naughty But Aren't.

I recently alerted readers to a subculture of the population that delights and titters in compiling dirty-sounding words that actually aren't. I challenged them to send me their favorite, or at least hoary, suggestions. And, by mukluk, they came through with flying Titicaca!

But some were not amused.

“;I'll have to castigate you if you vacillate on your bilabial fricatives,”; wrote one female reader whose name is unimportant and piddling. (Sarah J. Piddling, to be precise.)

Ouch. Castigation is the sincerest form of flummery. I think she was trying to be ironic, or at least fubsy. She threw in a few words like bilabial and fricatives that sound awfully naughty and somewhat titillating to me. I rushed to my Black's Law Dictionary to look them up and see if I could press charges.

Alas, they only refer to verbal sounds sometimes made by holding your lips together and releasing a turbulent flow of air. Hey, wait a second. I think those actually might be naughty words. I better get back to Miss Piddling and see if she was just fricativing in my ear.

  Another reader whose name is irrelevant and nugatory (Michael Pierpont Nugatory) also was moved to comment on the use of words that seem wayward but are only froward.

“;I have never seen such an abuse of homophones,”; he said. “;Please titivate whatever closet you came out of.”;

That hurt. Any regular reader of this column knows that I rarely abuse homophones. Why would I abuse words simply because they sound alike but have different meanings? That would really be making an antonym of myself. (a k a yourself.)

And I can assure Mr. Nugatory that all my closets, whether I am entering or leaving them, need no titivation. A little vacuuming, maybe.

Another reader whose name is unimportant and devaney (Seriously. His name really is Devaney. Daniel Devaney), said the discussion reminded him of Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.

I'm not sure what Organismic Biology is but think I should have sat in on that class. It certainly sounds more interesting than Soils 101. (Which, by the way, I actually took and learned that “;silt loam”; really are dirty words.)

  And yet another reader whose name is Rusty Weaver (Sorry. No joke here. Except his brothers are named Dusty, Musty, Lusty and Busty), remembers a sign at a swimming pool he encountered in high school that said “;No Expectorating In The Pool.”;

“;Being an adolescent at the time, my eyes lit right up when I read that,”; he said.

I can understand his delight. My eyes also light up when I enter a pool with low expectorations.