Help me with a dilemma. Recently, in a private conversation, a top BBC presenter referred to a celebrated newscaster as a "dim Welsh bastard". On another occasion, during a heated exchange with a radio colleague over the decision not to screen the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal for Gaza, he suggested my position was inevitable given that I am Jewish - an allegation that, as has been mentioned on these pages before, would prove shattering to the Vatican.
But the fact that it was misdirected does not make the remark any less potentially antisemitic. Should I then report such offensive comments to my line managers so these employees can be dealt with as Carol Thatcher was?
It's clearly worse to refer to a black tennis player by the grossly offensive "golliwog" phrase than to connect a newscaster with the land of his fathers. But the more important issue in the Thatcher case is not the limits of acceptable language; it's the point at which it becomes acceptable to report a private comment to the authorities.
The Thatcher row reminds us that there are words that possess such historical toxicity that they should only be used with extreme forethought. But the incident provokes me to use a word I have always hesitated to use in print. That word is "Orwellian".
The fallout over cheap wine at The One Show confirms a troubling sense of the development of a Snitch Britain, in which the zone of speech-policing is ever expanding. The football manager Ron Atkinson lost his job for a racist comment that he believed was off-air but was broadcast. Prince Harry got into trouble for unthinking bigotry on a tape intended for internal army consumption. Now an employee has gone for a comment neither recorded nor broadcast but simply snitched.
And the second member of the same family to suffer cries of "Thatcher out!" was not an isolated example. At the same time, the actor Christian Bale was embarrassed by the release of a recording of a rant against the incompetence of a movie colleague. The singer Miley Cyrus is under pressure to explain slitty-eyed gestures made in private photos posted on a website.
We can argue that these are people in the public eye who should know better but, as Thursday's House of Lords report on the "surveillance society" warned, everyone is now in the public eye: tracked as we walk the streets by 4m CCTV cameras protecting us from crimes for which we might then be arrested if our DNA is in the state database.
At least when we reach the office, we may be lost to surveillance - unless a colleague is training a mobile on us or reporting a remark. This is the way we live now. Until the arrival of thought-reading devices, everyone will have to live like a reality TV star, imagining a microphone roped round their neck.
Living this carefully is a difficult adjustment to make. I know of a recent incident at a media company where a student was invited in on work experience, a common practice. This time, though, the intern went home and wrote a blog detailing every off-the-record comment, celebrity indiscretion and commercially sensitive detail she had witnessed in the office. She then posted the choicest bits on Popbitch. The employers were horrified; the student surprised at their surprise.
This was simply a generational clash. In concepts of privacy, the young live naked, the old stay clothed. Thatcher's problem was to be a double anachronism, trusting to the ancient broadcasting rule that what happens in the green room stays in the green room.
But although her agent has invoked that tradition of post-show omerta in her defence, the truth is that few would trust these days to what it is now possibly risky to call Chinese walls. There was a time when unwinding cabinet ministers would whisper through the after-show smoke what they really thought of the PM, but a modern politician would visualise the internet waiting with cupped hands. This particular Thatcher, being merely the daughter of a politician, will not have had such antennae.
The consensus is that she could have got away with saying it at home; but how long will it before a case is brought over a remark heard through a wall? We can moralise about Thatcher and laugh at Bale but how many of us could survive a printout of every workplace rant we have ever had? Bigots should be challenged, but reporting is another matter. Golliwog is a nasty word, but so is snitch.