Have you ever had a meal ruined by the conversation surrounding it? I have, most recently while I was trying to enjoy a good plate of barbecue. It’s hard to ruin barbecue, but it was almost done to me this summer.

I had gone to a family restaurant to visit a beautiful waitress, but unfortunately a few of her friends had beaten me there and invited me to sit down with them. No big deal, they were nice girls, and I’d talked to them enough to make them comfortable around me.

Maybe too comfortable. Before I could get halfway through my sandwich, they were talking about sex, and using me as the “male voice” to bounce ideas off of. Soon, one started sharing with the table what her boyfriend liked in bed. As I begged her to change the subject, she laughed and continued right into the part about where her boyfriend liked her fingers in him during the act. (Not in his mouth.)

I stared straight ahead, food falling out of my mouth as it hung open. I’m sure I looked like I’d just tasted a cockroach in my sandwich. Apparently none of this caused my storyteller to notice, as she continued to laughingly talk about how her boyfriend was a big Army man, “not gay or anything.”

Wishing I were deaf, I just stared at her like a deer in the headlights, one desperately hoping those headlights will quickly hit him.

I suppose I could have just laughed it off and said, “Hey, no big deal, it’s the 21st century.” But it bothered me.

I don’t agree with Stephanie Jackson’s approach in yesterday’s column, “What’s so foul about four letter words?” In it Ms. Jackson basically said, “Hey, it’s fun to cuss, hopefully everyone will all talk crudely and then we can eventually make it normal.”

Granted, she was only talking about cussing, but I think the concept can be stretched further.

How did we get down to this low point in conversation? My bizarre barbecue talk reminded me of a column by a Boston University professor named Kevin Ryan, who blamed the TV show “Sex and the City” for lowering the standards of women everywhere. He said the show’s idea of feminism was to answer men’s general crudeness by bringing women down to the same low standard.

I’m inclined to agree. I can’t imagine my genteel southern grandmother in her 20s talking about the things I heard around that lunch table. I’m sure some enlightened letter-writer will tell me my grandmother was an unhappy woman imprisoned in a male-dominated society which told her she couldn’t say what she wanted, but I don’t think that’s it.

I think she simply had something that’s dying pretty fast these days. Class.

It doesn’t come from nice shoes, fine wine, or a Lexus. It comes from respecting yourself and the people around you and knowing when it’s OK to let filth spill out of your mouth.

The waitress at that restaurant had it, and that’s what attracted me to her – she was as disgusted as I was by her friends’ conversation points.

But this isn’t just about women. I know my friends and I have had some pretty crude conversations. Well, maybe it’s time to raise the quality of our dialogue a little bit.

I certainly don’t expect lunch conversation to be all about troop levels in Afghanistan, and as an adult, I have no problem talking about sex. But why not concentrate on something other than who hooked up with whom last night?

I say we give it a college try. Sure, we’ll still slip back to the salacious. But for the love of God, your significant other and my sandwich – when you do slip up – please try to keep some things to yourself.

- Marc McAfee is the online editor of The Red & Black.