I don’t know much about South American culture and slang. I do know, however, a little about the mechanics of confrontation. Even at Sunday League level, I’ve had verbal spats and faced down opposition players from Everton Valley to East Los Angeles. As a fan, I’ve exchanged insults — and worse — with rival supporters from Trafford Park to the Tiber.

That’s just the football-related stuff. In real life, I’ve been in the middle of riots, squared up to police on picket lines and fought fascist bully-boys with bare knuckles.

What have I learnt? Not much, but enough to know that if I’m having a row with a black man and I make a reference to his colour, he’s going to think it’s a racist slur.

Luis Suárez, Liverpool Football Club and legions of their fans seem bewildered that the word negrito directed at a black man in the course of an argument would lead the individual concerned to assume that he had been racially abused.

Nobody would deny that the exchange between Suárez and Patrice Evra was acrimonious. Nobody would deny that the word negrito makes reference to blackness. So where are Suárez’s grounds for defence?

Well, the linguistic experts tell us that negrito is not a pejorative term. In fact, it appears that it is a friendly phrase in Hispanic culture. In one defence of the Liverpool striker, the writer talked of hearing a young, white woman with a dark complexion being referred to by the same term during a business transaction in Buenos Aires.

The problem with this is that Evra is not a young white woman, nor is he Hispanic. He is a short, black Frenchman, who, from his perspective, appears to have been called something akin to “little black boy” by someone he was having a row with. Suárez, quite clearly, was not being genial. He was winding up Evra on the pitch in the heat of a Liverpool v Manchester United game. No wonder the defender felt racially abused.

In September, a mere handful of Liverpool fans would have even heard the term negrito. Now they are experts in the semantics of Hispanic slang, describing in detail how it is a term of affection. Well, if Suárez was being affectionate to a United player during a game, the club should crack down on him. An eight-game ban? Surely that should be a sackable offence?

There are so many words in English, French and Spanish that can be used in a quarrel that referencing colour in any way seems at best ill-advised and at worst racist. Either way it’s ****** stupid.

Suárez may not have had any racist intent but the Hispanic subtleties were lost on Evra. They’d be lost on most in Britain.

So this unedifying spat continues with Liverpool supporters — almost to a man — behind Suárez.

It is embarrassing. Is it not possible for Liverpool fans to have some empathy with Evra? To see that he felt racially abused? Seemingly not in the pathetically tribal world of football, where basic decencies are thrown out the window and the “my club right or wrong” ethic prevails.

If it were all a cultural misunderstanding, why didn’t Liverpool nip it in the bud in October? It may be me, but once the word negrito cropped up I winced. I may be culturally naive, but it sounded ugly. It would sound worse to a black man.

The club should have put out a statement that read something like this: “Patrice Evra has alleged that Luis Suárez made racist remarks to him during the game at Anfield. Suárez denies this emphatically but has come to realise that it was easy for Evra to misunderstand the nuances of the Spanish phrase used and believe that he had been racially abused. Suárez would like to apologise unreservedly for any upset caused and make clear that he is against racism and discrimination in all its forms. It was a poor choice of words in the context but any student of South American culture will explain it has no racial overtones. In future, Liverpool Football Club will issue its players with a set of guidelines as to what is acceptable and not acceptable.”

Effectively, just say sorry, I didn’t mean that, I feel a bit stupid now.

Suárez is not a racist but he has been a fool. The trick is not to compound foolishness.

Instead, Liverpool put out a statement that threw the blame back at Evra, then gave us the risible sight of Suárez warming up at the DW Stadium before the Wigan Athletic match in a T-shirt supporting himself.

Pointing the finger at Evra is shameful. It can only harden the FA’s determination to make its point. And despite the more rabid conspiracy theorists, this is a battle that the FA would rather not have.

This situation — along with the John Terry/Anton Ferdinand incident — has brought the game into disrepute and exposed racial fault lines in football and society that most thought had been buried forever. One look at the abuse that Stan Collymore — a former Liverpool forward — has been receiving shows that. Sadly, it looks like decency has been buried instead.