As someone who grew up in a slightly pious christian household, I lived the first part of my life sheltered from the evils of the outside world, namely swear words. My parents were always diligent to make sure my eyes and ears never experienced the more obscene side of the English language. However, all their restraint and hard work was undone as soon as they sent me off to public school and gave me internet access. But, because of my obliviousness to profanity, my early exposures to the wonderful world of swear words has led to some quite funny experiences. Let me share a couple:
Chapter 1: Throwing up the bird
I first learned the notorious gesture of the “middle finger” in the first grade at the ripe old age of six. It was a normal school day at elementary school and our class was preparing to line up for recess. As a model student I placed myself in the line ready to venture off from the classroom in a neat and orderly line out to the playground. But then, I look behind me and I see the class troublemaker, Travis, directly behind me. Travis then began the fateful conversation that would leave me scarred for the rest of my life. “Hey Budderball, can I show you something? Stick up your middle finger.” said Travis. And who was I to refuse? I had no idea what was coming next. As I made the gesture, Travis immediately shouts out “Ooh! You just said a bad word! That means ‘I hate you!’” At that point in my life, the worst curse words I had in my vocabulary were “Idiot” and “Shut up” so, telling someone I hated them was pretty strong damnation. Despite not even being aware of the true, much more vulgar meaning of the gesture I had just made, I still immediately broke down into tears. I had just broken every christian value of “Love thy neighbor” I had ever held and had done the equivalent of saying a CURSE WORD! I was filled with many emotions that day at recess: anger, guilt, sadness, shame, indignation. Fortunately, Taylor, the oldest and most mature girl in the class who got held back a year to repeat the first grade, came over to comfort me. She let me know that it was not my fault since I couldn’t have known what the gesture meant, and that Travis was just being mean to me. Because of Taylor’s highly advanced empathetic skills I was able to calm down. However, the trauma of the experience stills remains after all these years… Funnily enough, I don’t think it was until much later, maybe even middle school, until I learned the full implications of the middle finger. Moral of the story, screw you Travis! And also big shout-out to Taylor. She was the real MVP in this situation. (p.s. all names used in this story are real names and all connections to Taylor Swift and her dating life are purely coincidental)
Chapter 2: My first exposure to the F-bomb
My first time hearing or see the big bad F word was on a Roblox YouTube comment section back in 2016. Now, when I was in the 5th grade I was really into Roblox and found myself playing the game almost daily and watching a lot of Roblox YouTube videos. Naturally, since I was deeply immersed in the Roblox culture, I really wanted robux (Roblox in game currency) to buy cool clothes for my avatar. However, my parents would not get me any since they refused to spend money on my ficticious roblox character. So I traversed the web on my chromebook looking for methods of obtaining free robux. Eventually, after giving several sketchy website’s my family’s zip code and landline phone number, I found a YouTube video titled something like “How to get unlimited free robux 2016 still working” The whole method of the video was just to edit the html of the webpage of Roblox.com through inspect element to make it look like you had unlimited robux, but of course to ten-year-olds, this looks like high level hacking. Nevertheless, I quickly realized this method was bogus and proceeded to call out the video creator in his comment section. I typed something along the lines of “This method doesn’t work! The video is fake!”, to let other people know not to waste their time. However, after calling out this YouTuber on his fraudulent ways he replied to my comment saying “You Motherfucker! Yada yada yada something about how he’s trying to make videos and I’m ruining his life” The sentiment of the message was clear, the guy was mad I exposed him as a phony. However, I was perplexed by the word Motherfucker. I had never consciously heard the f-word up until this point in my life and so my first experience with the word being with the upgraded mother prefix version, was additionally confusing. I eventually was able to determine the meaning of the word through some google searches and find out it was some type of swear word. Compared to my middle finger experience, learning the f-word featured a lot fewer mental breakdowns, but not any less randomness.
Chapter 3: Bonus story! How I learned what marijuana was
Let us continue the chronological progression of my education in the less pure side of the human condition. In the seventh grade I was a little bit of a theater kid. I particularly enjoyed the musical Dear Evan Hansen. One day I decided it would be really funny to email my sister the lyrics of one of the songs over our school issued emails. The song in question was a song about Evan Hansen crafting up emails so sending the lyrics over email was perfectly on brand! However, at one point in this song, Evan Hansen mentions weed! I up until this point in my life did not think much of this line. I dismissed it, thinking it was about invasive plants or whatever (I don’t know what I was thinking, I was twelve). However, to my dismay I got called into the behavior counselors office because my email got flagged with drug content! Little goody-two-shoes me had to walk out of class and into that old lady counselor's office and plead for my innocence! The counselor quickly realized I was not a drug dealer, but in fact, an oblivious twelve year old. She then proceeded to inform me about weed and why it flagged the email system. For anyone wondering, receiving a drug education in a musty counselors office is not a pleasant experience. I walked back to my science class a changed man that day.
In conclusion, as someone who still doesn’t really know a lot about slang and the wide variety of ways humans express vulgarity in the English language, I’ve learned to accept these awkward and embarrassing moments that stem from my obliviousness as a part of life. And hey, sometimes they are kind of funny and make good material for a Thursday Detention article. That’s all for this time, thanks for reading :)
sincerely,
Budderball
Chapter 1: Throwing up the bird
I first learned the notorious gesture of the “middle finger” in the first grade at the ripe old age of six. It was a normal school day at elementary school and our class was preparing to line up for recess. As a model student I placed myself in the line ready to venture off from the classroom in a neat and orderly line out to the playground. But then, I look behind me and I see the class troublemaker, Travis, directly behind me. Travis then began the fateful conversation that would leave me scarred for the rest of my life. “Hey Budderball, can I show you something? Stick up your middle finger.” said Travis. And who was I to refuse? I had no idea what was coming next. As I made the gesture, Travis immediately shouts out “Ooh! You just said a bad word! That means ‘I hate you!’” At that point in my life, the worst curse words I had in my vocabulary were “Idiot” and “Shut up” so, telling someone I hated them was pretty strong damnation. Despite not even being aware of the true, much more vulgar meaning of the gesture I had just made, I still immediately broke down into tears. I had just broken every christian value of “Love thy neighbor” I had ever held and had done the equivalent of saying a CURSE WORD! I was filled with many emotions that day at recess: anger, guilt, sadness, shame, indignation. Fortunately, Taylor, the oldest and most mature girl in the class who got held back a year to repeat the first grade, came over to comfort me. She let me know that it was not my fault since I couldn’t have known what the gesture meant, and that Travis was just being mean to me. Because of Taylor’s highly advanced empathetic skills I was able to calm down. However, the trauma of the experience stills remains after all these years… Funnily enough, I don’t think it was until much later, maybe even middle school, until I learned the full implications of the middle finger. Moral of the story, screw you Travis! And also big shout-out to Taylor. She was the real MVP in this situation. (p.s. all names used in this story are real names and all connections to Taylor Swift and her dating life are purely coincidental)
Chapter 2: My first exposure to the F-bomb
My first time hearing or see the big bad F word was on a Roblox YouTube comment section back in 2016. Now, when I was in the 5th grade I was really into Roblox and found myself playing the game almost daily and watching a lot of Roblox YouTube videos. Naturally, since I was deeply immersed in the Roblox culture, I really wanted robux (Roblox in game currency) to buy cool clothes for my avatar. However, my parents would not get me any since they refused to spend money on my ficticious roblox character. So I traversed the web on my chromebook looking for methods of obtaining free robux. Eventually, after giving several sketchy website’s my family’s zip code and landline phone number, I found a YouTube video titled something like “How to get unlimited free robux 2016 still working” The whole method of the video was just to edit the html of the webpage of Roblox.com through inspect element to make it look like you had unlimited robux, but of course to ten-year-olds, this looks like high level hacking. Nevertheless, I quickly realized this method was bogus and proceeded to call out the video creator in his comment section. I typed something along the lines of “This method doesn’t work! The video is fake!”, to let other people know not to waste their time. However, after calling out this YouTuber on his fraudulent ways he replied to my comment saying “You Motherfucker! Yada yada yada something about how he’s trying to make videos and I’m ruining his life” The sentiment of the message was clear, the guy was mad I exposed him as a phony. However, I was perplexed by the word Motherfucker. I had never consciously heard the f-word up until this point in my life and so my first experience with the word being with the upgraded mother prefix version, was additionally confusing. I eventually was able to determine the meaning of the word through some google searches and find out it was some type of swear word. Compared to my middle finger experience, learning the f-word featured a lot fewer mental breakdowns, but not any less randomness.
Chapter 3: Bonus story! How I learned what marijuana was
Let us continue the chronological progression of my education in the less pure side of the human condition. In the seventh grade I was a little bit of a theater kid. I particularly enjoyed the musical Dear Evan Hansen. One day I decided it would be really funny to email my sister the lyrics of one of the songs over our school issued emails. The song in question was a song about Evan Hansen crafting up emails so sending the lyrics over email was perfectly on brand! However, at one point in this song, Evan Hansen mentions weed! I up until this point in my life did not think much of this line. I dismissed it, thinking it was about invasive plants or whatever (I don’t know what I was thinking, I was twelve). However, to my dismay I got called into the behavior counselors office because my email got flagged with drug content! Little goody-two-shoes me had to walk out of class and into that old lady counselor's office and plead for my innocence! The counselor quickly realized I was not a drug dealer, but in fact, an oblivious twelve year old. She then proceeded to inform me about weed and why it flagged the email system. For anyone wondering, receiving a drug education in a musty counselors office is not a pleasant experience. I walked back to my science class a changed man that day.
In conclusion, as someone who still doesn’t really know a lot about slang and the wide variety of ways humans express vulgarity in the English language, I’ve learned to accept these awkward and embarrassing moments that stem from my obliviousness as a part of life. And hey, sometimes they are kind of funny and make good material for a Thursday Detention article. That’s all for this time, thanks for reading :)
sincerely,
Budderball
