swearing

When I started 4th grade I didn't know that sticking up your middle finger meant "F**k off". I cut my middle finger on a fork at lunch and it hurt bad and was bleeding. I hopped up holding up my middle finger, not knowing that I was flipping everyone in the caf off. The luch lady came over and told me off.I was in tears by the end and still didn't know what I had done!!!

Becky

A good friend of mine had a niece. Apparently at some point one of her mom's clever boyfriends had told her that aligators and crocodiles were called fu**igators and fu**odiles. She was so convinced of this fact that no one could get her to stop saying it, at school church or to the neighbors. My friend and I thought it was hilarious but I've always wondered if she ever learned better, she wasn't a very bright girl.

Anon

When I was young I used to beleive that the f-word was actually fack. HAHAHA

Mo Cambelline

When I was 3 my older sister would say weird words so she wouldn't swear. One of those was 'grape'. She and her friends said this because they wanted pluck annoying people's head off like a grape. Well, one day she was babysitting me, and she said "He is such a grape!" I went to preschool the next day and told somebody my sister said the G word. Today I have problems eating grapes.

G****

I grew up in a very religious household and was always told that cursing was very bad. Around age eleven I began to listening to my own music, even some with curse words. I was always really nervous about playing this music ; I thought God would be so mad he would melt my stereo. Thankfully, it never happened!

Elizabeth

My parents were from a foreign country. Every time my dad would get mad, he'd let loose with a string of swear words in his native language. Then, when I'd hear an opera where they were screaming or singing loudly, I thought that they were also swearing.

Anon

When I was a child, I thought that "ferret" was a bad word, and to call someone a ferret was one of the meanest things you could do. To this day, I cringe when I hear the word.

Colleen

When I was in third grade, our teacher had left the room for a minute and left me "in charge" of taking names while she was gone. Well, all was well until I told the teacher that a girl said a bad word. She asked me what she said and I told her "the B-Word!" The girl got in trouble and had to write sentences. All for saying "Butt"!

Christi T

When I was about 7 or 8 I hung around with a girl in the neighborhood who was about 12. One day some kids going by on a school bus flipped us the bird. I ased her what that meant. She said, "What's the worst word you could think of?" I said, "Sh**?" "No, no," she said, "it starts with an 'F.'" I stared at her blankly... "An F then a U..?" she said. Finally she gave up and just whispered it to me. I said, "What does that mean?" Frustrated, she walked away. I didn't find out until about four years later.

Ann Y.

I used to believe that in America (I'm English) it was thought of as swearing to stick up your pinkie finger without the others.

I also thought that swearing could get you a heafty prison sentance in America so when we were going on holiday there soon and my dad swore I got upset.

Giggy

I remember somebody telling me that the C-word was "cent" as in the American coin.
I didn't understand how the Americans could get away with swearing all the time.

Alice in wonderland

There's a Peanuts movie called Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don't Come Back!) that I watched a lot when I was younger. At one part in the movie, Snoopy is driving a car and the car gets rear-ended. The drivers of the other cars start yelling at him, and as Marcie is saying stuff to them in French--as the characters were in France in this movie--Snoopy is making all sorts of hand gestures at them, including swiping under his chin. When I was a kid, I had no idea what that meant, and just thought he was being funny. I even did that to someone in fifth grade at lunch, and was surprised when he got all outraged and told the lunch lady what I'd done. Years later, I learned that what I'd done was the Italian equivalent of raising the middle finger. Whoops.

Funky Cold Candita

When I was in second or third grade, my parents were visiting a friend, and I got into a conversation with their boy, who was the same age as me, about rhymes. So we made up this game where we'd take a word, and then go through all the consonants of the alphabet, and determine whether or not there was such a word. One word that we decided to play with was 'luck'. We started through the alphabet saying, "There's such a word as 'buck', there's no such word as 'cuck', there's such a word as 'duck, there's no such word as 'fuck', there's no such word as 'guck', etc. Neither of us had never heard the word 'fuck' before, since our parents never used it. When we got to 'puck', we said there was no such word also, since neither or us had ever heard of hockey. We thought this little game was rather silly, so we kept it to ourselves because we didn't want our parents to think we were too silly. A year or two later, our family moved to California, and a new friend of mine introduced me to the word 'fuck', with fair warning that it was a nasty word. Shortly after that, I saw the word spray-painted on the side of a building, and I said, "That's a nasty word." I told my parents later on how I found out it was a nasty word.

Karen