language

I used to believe…

When I lived in Nairobi, Kenya as a high school kid, we went out to dinner one night with another family that had a little 5 year old kid. He was extremely excited in the car ride to the restaurant, which nobody understood, until we got there and he was instantly bewildered, then crushed. "What? This isn't a CARNIVAL!" he whined. The name of the restaurant was The Carnivore.

Poor kid; he had it wrong all along!

I used to believe…

Ok. When I was 3 or 4 I used to believe I could speak Indian when I moved my head to right and left with a lot of rrarrbrrnrr

I used to believe that you had a 'swear line' in your body. Each time you swore, you filled up a space on the line. Once you ran out of space, you died! Luckily Biology cleared it up.

I used to believe…

When I was younger, my older sister convinced me that the words "sock" and "pervert" meant the same thing. You can imagine wha my mom said when I decared "there's a load of dirty pervets in my room".

Biatch.

I used to believe…

when i was a jewish kid growing up, at the age of about 10, i heard from one of my friends that if you swore, you would go to hell and be with the devil. one of my other friends informed me that the devil went around and cheated people out of souls, and then kept them to work for him. well, i always had a spark of perverse evil in me, so i figured if i went to hell, i could find a way to talk the devil into letting me work with him and i thought it would be so exciting to collect souls with him. i had never sworn before in my life, but after that i started sweraing A LOT and made it my goal in life to go to hell and assist the devil when i died. i'm still working for it!!!

I used to believe…

My brother took french all through high school and at a local university in the summers. One time at the end of one of the summer classes they were going to have a class party and everone was asked to bring one item. They asked my brother to bring some baguettes. He replied "bag-ettes of what?" Luckily, he says, they thought he was just joking, so he laughed along with them and asked our mom what they were later.

I used to believe that BS meant big stinker. One day my mom told mer that some uncle of mine had died. I didn't even know I had an uncle so I wasn't upset. I said "What a BS." My mom grounded me for a week. I was 9 then.

I used to believe…

When I was five (and just learning to read) I was looking at a roll of TUMS on my mom's nightstand and read the letters backwards.

A few weeks went by and instead of just reading the letters, I could actually put the letters together. Instead of my mom's medicine being called S...M...U...T... I now knew it was called SMUT.

At the grocery store checkout stand a few weeks later, my mom was rubbing her temples while we were waiting to check out. I proudly said - so everyone could hear - "Mom, if you're feeling bad, just buy you some SMUT. It always makes you better."

Her jaw dropped, and I think she forgot about her headache.

I used to believe…

When I was 5, I believed that the older you are the bigger the books you read. I have clear memories of sitting in library class planning that in the future when I was in grade 6 (about 11 years old) I would borrow the two red 10 cm thick books that sat on the shelf behind the library teacher. As I grew older I realised that I had in fact planned to borrow two volumes of the dictionary !!!

I remember in middle school I had read some detective novel or another where one character describes another as a "sonofabitch," just like that, all one word. I misread it, and thought it was a neat, new curse word I had never heard before. I didn't realize until high school that "snofabitch" is not a real word.

I used to think in spelling class that we would learn how to spell every word that existed. So, therefore, I couldn't wait until we got to the lessons that contained the swear words. I was a bit disappointed when I learned that wasn't going to be the case...:)

I used to baby-sit a little girl. She loved to watch Sesame Street and particularly loved the character Elmo. So, when she was three and learned her alphabet, she always said H-I-J-K-Elmo-P. It was always so adorable and we would ask her to say her alphabet over and over just to hear it. Last time I saw her, when she was 6, she was still saying it that way

I used to believe…

When I was at nursery, there was a nun called Sister Tereseta and she was my favourite. I remember calling this sweet old lady "Sarah Tweeter!"

I used to believe…

When I was really little, just learning to write letters and read I used to think I was very very privelaged. This was because I always saw people of other colors or cultures talking other languages and I thought they were too stupid to speak English. I used to pride myself in being smarter than the foreign people that only spoke gibberish.

I used to believe…

When I was in Kindergarten, I was wholly and completely convinced that thirty was the highest number. NO ONE got in the way of that no matter what they said, no matter how smart I believed they were. Thirty was the highest number in the world, a big intimidating, staggering number. I used to be very, very mad at my teachers who told me otherwise. I screamed at one of them at the top of my lungs (possibly more, I only remember one in particular). My friends back then even knew. They would say "well there's forty and fifty and sixty ...", and, let's make a long story short - they weren't my friends much longer.

I used to believe "fuck" was an even worse word for "penis" (I was around 7, "penis" wasn't said louder than a whisper, if at all).