The message leaps out like a string of swear words interrupting a prayer service.
"THIS IS A PROFANITY FREE ZONE!" reads the handmade sign in the window of the North Suffolk Mental Health Association office in East Boston's bustling Maverick Square.
It was hung on the spur of the moment, within the last year, by a worker frustrated by denizens of a barroom on the block who linger outside the association's door and cuss like sailors, according to an agency staffer.
It has had no real calming effect, according to the agency and recent interviews with gin-mill regulars, who crudely derided the effort. Still, similar politeness pleas are popping up in storefronts and bistros all over the city, from downtown to Dorchester.
They are a sign of the times - of a culture of crassness that's been propagated by a society that is increasingly iPod-anonymous and consumed by the mad rush of ambition, according to P.M. Forni, a nationally known civility specialist.
Though singular and ad hoc, these tiny gestures are also part of a larger national backlash against the continued onslaught of rudeness, he says.
"There is around the country a tide of reaction toward uncouth behavior," says Forni, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and author of "Choosing Civility: The Twenty-five Rules of Considerate Conduct."
In Maryland's Howard County, they've distributed "Choose Civility" bumper stickers. In Cleveland Heights, Ohio, they named the 2006-'07 school session "The Year of Civility." Elsewhere, they've declared peace on bullies by teaching calming conflict-resolution techniques.
While the Hub's Miss-Manners-militants are acting on their own to raise banners against boorishness, Forni says they share the same impulse as those organized campaigns.
"They are so fed up with rude behavior," says Forni, "that's their way of saying 'enough' and taking a stand."
If there's any place where louts ought to be off-limits, it's within the aloof ambience of Boston's cafe society. Yet in recent memory there was a typical Trudy Rudey grating the senses of those around her at the Espresso Royale Caffe near Boston University.
The woman was trying to order for herself, a friend, and a third party - on the other end of her cellphone. As others waited in line, according to the manager, she bombarded employees there with a litany of questions about whether they had this item or that.
The woman couldn't help herself. She's part of an outright contagion. According to a survey conducted earlier this year by the Civility Initiative that Forni directs at Johns Hopkins and the Jacob France Institute at the University of Baltimore, two inelegant attitudes often found at coffee shops made the Top 10 list of rudest behaviors: "treating service providers as inferiors" (number 4) and "using cellphones or text-messaging in midconversation or during an appointment or meeting" (number 10).
Which is why there's now a sign on the cash register at the Espresso Royale, warning those at the head of the line: "DON'T DO IT," with the no-no in question indicated by a drawing of a cellphone with a red line through it.
Manager Brendan Barrows believes the caution has seriously cut down on the incidences of customers ordering while on a cell, which he says is hard to handle at a business that serves more than 1,000 customers a day.
Not that there still aren't a few recalcitrants, like those cranky customers who want to know why Barrows can be on the phone - he's conducting business! - but they can't. Or those, like drivers who run red lights, who behave as if the in-their-faces sign were not there.
"The ones who are rude enough to talk on a cellphone to begin with," says Barrows, 25, "usually aren't aware enough to notice the sign."
As the rudeness quotient grows more serious, so do the messages conveyed from shop windows.
"ONLY ONE student allowed at a time please" is the civility alert broadcast from the front of the Kim Market, in Dorchester's Fields Corner.
Proprietor Kim Nguyen is not aware that those exclusionary words, according to civil libertarians queried, might violate the rights of students to access a place open to the public.
She does know that mere letters like hers, scratched out on the back of a cigarette carton, are no match for the teens who have burst into her store and created havoc. She says they've stolen chips, tossed a gallon jug of water onto the floor, thrown a quarter at her when paying for a juice, and mocked her native Vietnamese tongue.
Though she is powerless to enforce it, Nguyen says the very act of putting up the sign makes her feel more powerful.
"If I don't have the sign," says Nguyen, 58, "the kids will all say, 'Let's go in.' "
In some measure, she says, the result is that some young people will now enter in twos and threes instead of the sixes and sevens they did before.
Even as others continue to harass and even assault - one youth, she says, punched her husband in the face after he caught him stealing - she tries to kill them with kindness. "I just tell them, 'Don't do that,' " Nguyen says. "I don't want them to get in trouble. They're just kids. But I don't want trouble, too."
And though her English is not perfect, it's clear Nguyen has mastered several important words when dealing with customers: "please . . . thank you . . . you're welcome."
On Washington Street in Dorchester's Codman Square, the altered stop sign in the store window halts passersby with its brashness: "STOP DOING DUMB" um, stuff, it proclaims.
Shopkeep Marc Stallworth says that when he took over the Corner Convenience store this year, he moved the placard to the forefront to give it more play. Now, from its current perch, the communiqué can be seen by those streaming in and out of Dorchester District Court, across the street.
Some who've gone to that courthouse have faced serious jail time because they responded to a simple turn of incivility - someone stepped on their new sneakers! - with vicious retaliation.
For Forni, there's plenty of other proof in daily life that rudeness can become inflamed, including common traffic transgressions that escalate into road rage.
"Many acts of physical violence have their origins in acts of disrespect," he says.
Stallworth says it's not his desire to play holier-than-thou with people, but to spark an inner dialogue with their consciences before they transgress.
"I ain't no saint," says Stallworth, 45. He makes no effort to hide his own rap sheet, which includes a conviction for the 2003 beating of his daughter, 17 at the time. Stallworth says he was doling out discipline.
"There's no perfect human being in the world," says Stallworth, a Dorchester resident. " 'I've been there,' I tell them."
Further along the Codman Square corridor, a batch of local businesses like the Hip Zepi USA clothing emporium are all displaying the same poem, titled, "What You Lose When You Respond To Ignorance," on salmon-colored paper. It talks about not seeking revenge against violence or for other real or perceived slights.
While stores in other parts of town proudly show off certificates of green attesting to their eco-friendly practices, these Codman merchants say they're trying to stop the local sidewalks from becoming bloodshed red.
"It might help out one person," says Hip Zepi manager Rodney Kornegay, 30, explaining why the verse beams from his window alongside rows of merchandise.
The author of the piece is a 66-year-old cable-splicer named Richard M. Whitley Sr., and he has higher hopes than that.
The former nightclub manager turned churchgoer said something out of the blue awoke him one morning last year before Sunday service at Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in Roxbury, and compelled him to compose it over three or four hours.
Whitley says he's spent hundreds of dollars to print up copies, and he figures he's personally circulated thousands of them across the city. While some young people mock his creation, he says, many others are grateful and accepting of his work, which contains the line: "Living Is About Forgiving."
For Whitley, that's a signal to push onward. The Dorchester resident says he wants to go global with his message, believing that one man can spark a change.
"I'd like to have them done up in every language, and ship it to every country," he says. "In time it will make a difference." Whitley pauses to ponder his certainty. "I know so."
Ric Kahn can be reached at rkahn@globe.com.
