When I Was Young...

I've always been too confident for my own good. Particularly when I was growing up, I assumed I knew perfectly well what certain words and phrases meant when in fact I hadn't the slightest idea. Let's take a walk down memory lane...

* My mother rarely purchased sweets for us. When she did, it was on very special occasions. Soda counted as a sweet, so my mother never taught me the word "soda". One day in the store, I started screaming that I wanted a "calowie". She asked me to say what a "calowie" was and I could only scream louder and louder. When she finally calmed me down, we were passing the soda aisle. I reached out for Diet Pepsi and began my little show all over again. Of course, mom didn't get me a "calowie" but wondered where I got the idea. That night, she saw the commercial for Diet Pepsi which proclaimed several times, "just one calorie".

* When I was little, I thought the word "urinate" had something to do with the number eight each of us was automatically assigned when someone uttered the word "urinate".

* When I was a little older, I was watching one of those British dramas on PBS and saw one man slap another man twice. On the first slap, he called the man a fiend; the second, he called him a bastard. I thought "bastard" was just some kind of British insult amounting to "jerk". One time in the back seat of the car, my young brother began acting up. I pretend slapped his face, repeating the line from the British drama, thereby calling my brother a "bastard". The front seat creaked a little as my mother turned around. She didn't need to speak. The look in her eyes told me exactly what I had done: "If you ever use that word again, I will KILL YOU WITH MY BARE HANDS".

* Until I reached high school, I used the phrase "in lieu of" to mean "because of", rather than the correct "instead of".

* I came tromping home from school one day when I was six or seven. I walked straight up to my dad with a cavalier look on my face. He asked me what I was thinking. I smugly proclaimed, "I heard the 'f' word at school today. I know what it means". He smirked and asked me what it meant. Realizing that I hadn't thought that far ahead, I shifted a little and said awkwardly but confidently, "It means... 'you stupid boy'."

* In sexual education, we were learning about ways men and women take care of themselves and get tested for STDs. Going through what was an otherwise boring part of Sex Ed, I became intrigued at the idea of a pap smear. Our book didn't explain what it was, just that it was a very important procedure for women to have every once in a while. I gazed off into the distance and thought of my dog who sometimes dragged his ass across the lawn. While I was sure it would be much less of a spectacle for women than for my dog, I imagined the mechanics must be relatively the same. Perhaps not for a long distance, but they must certainly drag their vagina across a piece of sterilized paper, or have some paper dragged across for them. Many years later, a female friend told me what a pap smear is really like. I was horrified. Props to the ladies.