PRECOCIOUS two year old girl said "O, fuck it" for about a week recently. Every time she dropped her milk or slipped in the bath, she'd say "O, fuck it." "I just ignored her," says her mother Carole. "You feel like laughing but you have to pretend not to notice. Last week it was `Jesus Christ, it's raining again'."

"She hears swear words in the shops and maybe from me sometimes, although I try not to say things like that in front of her. She harps on things and waits for a reaction. Her latest is `I'm not impressed and I won't co operate'." Carole, who lives in Phibsboro, Dublin, wonders what her daughter will pick up when she starts going to school.

Yvonne Barnes, a mother of two boys who are seven and 12, says that her children, who are growing up in Blackrock, Co Dublin, don't use swear words. "It's not that it's banned at home, it's just that we don't use bad language ourselves. But they are both in the rugby and the soccer clubs so they hear plenty, but they don't use it in front of us."

As children get older the problem is not always as amusing.

"I'd be very concerned with some of the language that the younger pupils have," says Finian McGrath, principal of a primary school in Dublin's inner city. "You do overhear those words in the yard, in the gym, some of the words you'd hear you would be very, very frightened at the language, at the ferocity and the sheer vulgarity. That would be a major concern. Some of them don't understand. They hear them in the wider community."

McGrath, who has been teaching in Dublin for the past 20 years, believes that the frequency and depravity of swear words has definitely increased since he started teaching.

"It's symptomatic of what's going on in broader society that you have all these children using these bad words, which are sexually degrading to women. They are using them from a young age.

Verbal abuse from one pupil to another pupil is the second most common form of serious misbehaviour in all primary schools, according to the INTO report of its survey on discipline in primary schools, which was published in November 1993. This, according to the report, puts into perspective the key role which teachers play in socialising their pupils.

Lying was found to be the most common form of serious misbehaviour amongst primary school children, but the report points out that "it may have been a design fault to have included lying under the heading of serious pupil misbehaviour," adding that teachers did not rate lying as misbehaviour.

According to the survey verbal abuse from one pupil to another occurs often or very often in 38 per cent of all schools. It occurs often or very often in 28 per cent of all rural schools and often or very often in 60 per cent of all inner city schools.

The geographical location of families and schools does seem to make a difference to the experience of parents and teachers.

Helen Murphy, a primary school teacher in a small rural school in Co Mayo, says that "we just don't allow it (in the school). We've tried to eradicate it and the incidence would be relatively infrequent. But of course we have the `F' word. You hear it on the football pitch." Other words which the children use are "asshole", "jackass" and "she's an old cow". In a small school with less than 60 pupils. "It's easy enough to control it but it's still used," says - Helen Murphy.

PADRAIGIN Ni Chadhla, vice principal of Scoil na Leanai, which is an all Irish primary school for boarders in Ring, Co Waterford, says that "crap is a word they can come out with anytime, anywhere. The (bad) words they use wouldn't be that extreme. They wouldn't usually say fuck. They wouldn't use it in my presence. If they did say fuck they would be shame faced."

She finds that "certain words are becoming more common place" amongst her 12 year old students. They will often, for example, say something like "he's a ride" amongst themselves in order to sound shocking.

"I don't find kids any worse than they ever were. They are very open. They are just getting more open. They don't put you up on a pedestal, which I am glad of. I don't want to be on a pedestal," she says. However, when she explains to them that certain words are unacceptable, she finds that they will not use them again in a class room situation.

Ailish Hayes, an English and Religion teacher at St Ailbe's Secondary School in Tipperary, says that swear words are "not acceptable" in class. Students, she says, "don't use any more than you'd hear on television and elsewhere from the so called adult audience".

She says that the "F" words are "very often used (by young people) to fill in those spaces, it's as if there's a lack or an inadequacy to describe, in spite of the fact that there's such verbal advancement to describe situations. . . It's almost that they are not as good at describing situations. It seems to be a cover up for their lack of ability or accuracy. Today, she says, "there's a much greater use of swear words. But, I don't think students use any more than us." She believes that there is a greater acceptance of swear words in society in general. Teenage students are exposed to so much on television and in videos today, she says. In spite of this, the use of swear words in videos "would be much worse".

Finian McGrath says that trying to change the bad language of children who come from disadvantaged areas "is a very, very hard battle". He says that a recent visit from a nurse who was giving sex education classes to the senior boys drove this home to him.

He left her alone in the classroom "so that they could talk freely". She was amazed and shocked, he recalls. The sexual connotations of their words are shocking.

One of the saddest aspects, he says, is that "in 1995 children don't seem to get through their lives without learning those words".