I can remember the time, though I cannot date it with any precision, when local bar associations refused permission to lawyers to advertise on television. Television advertising was all very well for beers and used cars, the thought was, but the practice of law was felt to be well above that. This, as we know, has now radically changed, and lawyers, most of them specializing in personal injury, though some in domestic relations and a few in wills and trusts, now advertise heavily on television, diminishing, I think it fair to say, the gravity of the practice of law itself.

A much larger step, a jump, really, came about when ED became a subject for television advertising. By “ED,” of course, I do not mean the letters denoting Jill Biden’s advanced degree, but erectile dysfunction. The first television ads for Viagra were revolutionary, if less than explicit. They chiefly showed men ecstatic at having regained their sexual power via the little blue pill. I used to watch a fair amount of television with my young granddaughter in those days, and I am pleased to report that, when a Viagra ad came on-screen, she never asked, “Grandpa, why are those men so happy?” I’m still not sure what I would have answered.

Thus far there have been no Viagra-comparable ads for women, as there is no comparable product. But of late there has been a rash of ads about products that will keep women dry in places that once were not thought discussable even in private. So, too, have more recent ads featured eliminating less than agreeable smells emanating from those same places, at least one of these ads playing the subject for (not at all funny) laughs as two young women sniff each other in an elevator.

Meanwhile, weight-reducing ads show vastly overweight women, in their underwear, grasping their drooping stomachs. Other ads feature uplifting brassieres and other lingerie. I’m glad that my mother, a woman of formidable dignity, isn’t around to view any of them.

Not to be underdone, one men’s underwear company has begun to run television ads for its “ball hammock.” “Ball hammock underwear,” the online description of the product runs, “is a type of men’s underwear that has a pouch-like cup to support the genitals. The pouch keeps the genitals firm around and provides a snug fit, which can reduce chafing, squashing, sticking, and sweating.” The ad shows what look to be two ping-pong balls dropped into a cloth pouch.

Outside the realm of television commercials, I note that certain words and phrases once considered verboten in what used to be called “polite society” (remember polite society?) are now allowed utterance on local and national television. Some have come by way of athletes through their usually less than notably incisive interviews: Here “kick ass” is common in all its variants apart from the pluperfect passive subjunctive. Politicians and pundits on cable news channels have begun to use “pissed off” with a casual frequency. The f-word has not come onto the scene, but I note a recent rise on television of the adjective “freakin’, ” which is perhaps a dark promise of things to come.

I grew up around all these words and phrases and have used them often enough myself. I am, moreover, as sex-minded as the next guy. Why, then, do I find myself not so much perturbed as saddened by the public use of these words and the sex-ridden television commercials that have come more and more to blot our public life? Vulgarity, it seems, is winning the day.

In an earlier, more stratified society, “vulgar” meant common, ordinary, without distinction. In more recent years it has come to mean coarse, morally crude, gross, obscene, tasteless, and tawdry — all worth avoiding.

To watch on television women in their underwear, to view commercials about male and female genitalia, to hear words spoken in Congress and other public places that were once confined to the bar and the locker room, all these provide everyday confirmations of one’s country’s coarsening.

What, as the Russian revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky asked, is to be done? Steer clear of commercials about hustler lawyers. Mute all commercials for underwear and about odiferous private parts. Buy a hammock, but only for your backyard. End your own use of profanity in public places. Vulgar is as vulgar does, and the only way to put a dent in our country’s raging vulgarity is to have nothing to do with any of it.