Occasionally, we get calls at this newspaper from people who want to know why their comments were not included in the rants and raves column.

So today we will respond to a few specific ones so that you will know why they did not appear.

In one instance, the rant involved at least three very vulgar words. It was automatically deleted. No chance of it making the cut. If you can’t express yourself for public consumption in this forum without using that kind of language, don’t even bother to submit it.

In another case, the rant was a libelous malicious attack on an individual who is neither a politician nor a public figure. We reserve the right to edit for libel and slander.

And one rant had to do with perceived friction within a church and some of its church members. That’s an in-house thing for you and your church. If you want to praise a church’s involvement or if you want to address religion in general, pro or con, that’s fine.

But, we do not use the rants and raves column to air in-house conflicts. We suggest you talk with your deacons, members, church leaders, pastor, choir or whatever.

Then there was one that made no sense at all. It was for the most part gibberish, revealing no relationship to any local, state or national issue or event. Nor did it appear to be an intelligible rave — just a connection of words with poor punctuation. We simply didn’t know what it was about.

And if you include animal noises with your telephone rants and raves submission, chances are you won’t see your opinion in print.

With that said, please be aware that we sometimes receive between 100 to 200 rants and raves each week. Over a period of a week, we can only run about 50 of these. If several are about the same subject, we attempt to run a sampling pro and con.

Also, if there is a hot public issue at hand, we may group a sampling and try to publish those with timeliness in mind.

If your rant or rave doesn’t make it right away, keep submitting it and your turn likely will arrive. Occasionally we will print a bonus round in order to use as many comments as possible.

Certainly the rants and raves column is a viable forum for expressing opinions. These comments provoke thought, pose questions, point out advantages and disadvantages, emit humor and sometimes are wrapped in silliness or satire — all ingredients of our democratic soup.

Statistically, there are more rants than raves. That’s perhaps a quirk of human nature associated with the fact that life is an adversary system. However, we do encourage raves as we believe there’s a whole lot of good going on around us that deserves uplifting.

And pro or con on whatever issue, we encourage signed letters to the editor in which you can make a more detailed and larger case for your cause that day.