So, I’m sitting in my car at a traffic light at dusk. My hands are placed neatly at ten and two on the steering wheel and I’m preparing to proceed in a safe and responsible fashion once the light turns green again.

A car pulls up to my left. It’s one of those decked-out cars, with the tinted windows, dazzling stickers and dual whatever on the back. The stereo is cranked and the car bounces up and down like an inner city carnival ride.

Several young men are staring at me from inside the car. They have bandannas all over the place, oversized basketball jerseys and baseball caps tilted at every angle allowed by physics. Just as the light turns green, the badass dude in the passenger seat speaks to me.

“You know,” he said, all low and menacing. “Smoking is bad for you.”

My friends, I was rattled. Not because of this new revelation that cigarettes may contain carcinogens and presents other health hazards. But because the badass in the car had said something I was completely unprepared for.

I hate to say it, people. But when it comes to the ugly exchanges that occasionally pass between people, predictability is the rule of the road. When you cut off someone in traffic, you can pretty much count on what he will say to you. He will say: “Why don’t you watch where you’re going, moron?” Because that’s what his daddy taught him to say. And his granddaddy before him.

There is a very sensitive gauge standing somewhere in Denver, Colo. Its only function is to measure the number of times a certain insult is flung across America. Just recently, the line: “Why don’t you learn how to drive!” was screamed for the one billionth time. They had fireworks to mark the occasion.

I’m not saying we are predictable by nature. If that were so, I would have nothing to do on those long, lonely jaunts around pristine Lewiston. People do unpredictable things all the time. No gauge anywhere, no matter how sensitive, can possibly predict the number of stupid things somebody will do downtown.

But when the heat is on, and an angry person is forced to express himself, the old chestnuts are always just too close to resist. It’s the same on the bathroom walls, or on the scarred bricks in the back alleys. What’s the first thing you see written in those places? That’s right. It’s my name and telephone number.

But the very next thing you can count on finding is that one word: the one nasty word that has been dirty since it was invented by primitives who scrawled it in caves. The mother of the four-letter-word can be found scratched onto library tables, spray painted on the sides of buildings, written in pencil on telephone poles.

Millions of people every day, given one chance to deliver their views to the word, choose that one word over and over. The world is their canvas, yet all they can muster with the pencil, the magic marker or the chalk is that one word. The word is so ubiquitous and widespread now, it may be the first thing extraterrestrial see when they first visit the planet in 2017. The E.T.’s will look at each other, scratch their tentacles and ask: “#$#@!??”

Behold the middle finger. Such a commonplace gesture, it is believed to date back to the year 1415 when one Viking ship rammed another. Yet billions use it every day, and you don’t need the Denver gauge thingy to verify that.

The middle finger really means nothing anymore. The idea of any such gesture made in anger is to set a person back and make him feel your rage. But the average kid has seen the one-finger salute a hundred times by the time he is 9 years old. It has lost its effectiveness through sheer overuse.

The next time some yahoo steals your parking space, try jamming your thumbs up your nostrils and wiggling your ears. You will look ridiculous. Your wife will crawl back in the car and hide behind the seat. But that gesture will cause the focus of your ire more genuine unease and confusion than any clich finger ever could. It could possibly keep him awake that night.

And so the kid with the public health warning at the stop light somewhat pleased me because he said something I didn’t see coming. And none of it really matters much, because exchanges like these are small disruptions to your day.

The sad part is that we have locks on our doors, court systems and armies because, when it comes down to the serious stuff, the deadly stuff, that’s when people start to get inventive.

Mark Laflamme is the Sun Journal’s unpredictable cop reporter.