Words and Phrases I Was Terrified to Use As A Preteen Because I Thought They Were "Dirty"

• Easy

• Hard

• Long

• Dork (It does not mean “a whale’s penis.” Why did we all think it did?)

• Dictionary (In first grade I got teased mercilessly for saying it too slowly)

• Pencil (I also got teased mercilessly for saying I loved my Keroppi pencil. This was doubly upsetting to me, because everyone knows Keroppi is in a monogamous relationship with his girlfriend Keroleen!)

• Pickle

• Nuts

• Apples (I remember being offended when someone used the phrase “apples on the table” in a schoolyard rhyme because I thought it meant “she has big boobs!”)

• Cupcakes (Camp friends said it meant “boobs.”)

• Twinkie (Camp friends said it meant… well, you know.)

• Cookies (Everyone said it meant something dirty, but no one could agree on what it was.)

• Banana

• Monkey (Perhaps it was the association with bananas?)

• Jerk

• Jack

• Screw

• Nail

• Oral

• Aural

• Blow (I consider this and the preceding two Bill Clinton’s fault)

• Suck (Of course)

• Suckman (Honest to goodness surname of a boy in my grade)

• Hyman (Another classmate’s unfortunate surname. For years, I could never understand why my brother’s girlfriend would giggle when I said it.)

• Ball

• Bawl

• Jiffy Lube

• Wet ’n’ Wild

• Herbal Essences (Because of their commercials.)

• Absolutely anything ever said in an Herbal Essences commercial

• “Ho” (as in “Land, ho!” or “Listen, ho!” It’s said in every Shakespeare play ever. Our class clown Hovik got a lot of mileage out of that in tenth grade English class.)

• “Yum” or “Mmm” or any other food-related onomatopoeia

• “Oo la la” (I didn’t realize it basically just mean “ugh” or “oy vey” until I had a babysitter who spoke French and said while we were stuck in traffic)

• Not actually a word but that “A-OK” symbol you make with your fingers (Someone said it meant “asshole.” Now I guess it means white supremacist? So I guess they weren’t wrong.)

• Jump

• “Jumpin’, Jumpin’” (No one could ever convince me they were singing “their pockets full grown”)

• Pump

• Bump

• Pounce

• Bounce

• Get up

• Get down

• Jiggy (a friend refused to dance to “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit’ It” at the Camp Dance because she said it was “perverted”)

• Deep

• Deeper

• Come

• Hit

• It

• The very word “dirty”

Needless to say, I had to hit the dictionary pretty hard to come up with some synonyms. I like to think it gave me a deeper appreciation of words, but at the time, it drove me nuts.

Stuff I Did This Week: It’s Matilda’s 30th birthday, so I wrote a piece about what I think she’d be doing now for Vanity Fair! (Probably not making a list of words she once thought were dirty.)

Fake BBC Show Title of the Week: Is It Currently Raining?