swearing

when i was in 4th grade, i was talking about how bad this guy was in my report. i got confused and meant to say "grouch" but i thought THAT was a bad word so i said b**** instead! i felt so embarreseed when my mom saw my report with my teacher explaining to me what that actually meant.

Anon

As a kid, I learned from a song that the French word "connard" meant "a**hole."
One time, when I was in school, I called someone a "connard" and the teacher heard.
The teacher sent me to detention, which led me to believe that all French words were swears.
And the ironic part was, it was my SPANISH teacher who heard and sent me to detention.

I'll stick with English, thank you very much

When I was about 4, I dropped a piece of carrot from my plate onto the floor. In my frustration, I uttered a random syllable, which happened to be the "F-word". My parents were shocked, and my mom said "Do you know what that word means?? It means 'kill your mother'!" Until I was about 13 I believed that that was another meaning of that word.

Jon

One time when I was about 6 I think,I was sitting in the back seat of the car and this other car filled with teenagers pulled up beside us.They looked over at me and they were smiling and then one of them flipped me off but of course back then I didn't know what it meant so I just smiled and did the same thing back and I'm pretty sure I did it wrong because they all started laughing even harder.To tell you the truth I just thought it was their way of saying what's up,or something.

Sasha

I found out about cursing in second grade. I remember being in the computer lab (you can TELL this was the early 90s because we had some sort of turtle math blaster thingamajig, and I didn't even know that "*" stood for multiplication), and being terrified of cursing, and what it would do to me, but still wanting to try it out. OF course cursing was the word "dumb" or GASP "Shut up". I remember me and my friend Natasha Djsevic or something were like "Well, does curshing bring you to hell?" "How many curses are you allowed?" and my friend innocently turned to me and said "Oh, about 100." I immediately started counting all the times I said dumb in my head or out loud and got so scared!!!! So insane to look back on now!

Bonnie

When I was 7, I found out that the middle finger was bad. So I started walking around with all my fingers up except my middle finger. I thought that it meant the reverse of the middle finger. When my hand started getting tired, I quit, and that was the end of it, except I would do it for about 2 seconds until I realized that I was being weird.

OUTCAST

A young friend believed that the word dummy was a swear word. I used dummy to describe a puppet and was scolded by the girl. "My teacher said that was a bad word!"
It was fine by my use of the word.

Anon

When I was a little girl my brother use to call me "naughty name" and I would run and tell my mom. She separated us in a room and could later her my brother whispering across the room to me "naughty name, naughty name".

Bellbean

When I was a lil 'un, I used to think that if you cursed at someone, you actaully put a curse on them. I never learned the term swearing until I was about 10. So you can believe my suprise when I heard my older cousin getting in a fight with one of the other kids at our trailer park, and called him a mothaf*cka. I thought that the other kid [who always gave me sweets to make my cousin jeleaus], would die and I would have no more sweets! So the next day I went up to the other kids caravan and asked his mum "did robby's boils go away yet?"

chubird

when i was little i believed that you could start swearing when you were 10 but not the big swear words just the little ones like crap , sucks , freak and then when you were a little older you could say words like s*** and b**** and f*** , needless to say i thought i was cool when i turned 10 and i could "cuss"

amanda

I used to believe that the "S" word was really ship soo i went home thinking that it was ok to swear i was only like 5 and i went home and started saying holy ship because i had older friends and they always said holy s*** in front of me until i figured out it was really s*** and not ship

Anon

When I was eleven or twelve, I saw the live-action Smurfs movie and there's a scene where a human says, "Stop saying, 'smurf' for everything! I mean, what does it even mean?! Smurf! Smurfitty smurf smurf smurf!" and a Smurf replies, "There's no call for that kind of language!", so I thought that "Smurfitty" was a swear word.

Anon

I used to think that "crap" was not even mildly offensive and that "shit" wasn't a cuss word, up until I was about 6 and a half. Until then, I'd occasionally mutter
"shit crap" under my breath when I was angry. How ironic that they mean the same thing, so I was essentially saing "poop poop!!!"

Mandy Grrrl

My parents would refer to bowel movements as B.M.s. I don't think I figured out that it was an abbreviation until I was in high school (I guessed that it was a word spelled sort of like "be-em," but could get no straight answer regarding this). Sometime later, one of my younger brothers used the term "B.M." around some friends at college, who had never heard the expression before in their lives! They were delighted with this new ersatz "bad word," and took to using it in creative ways. "Anyone in the bathroom?" "I am! I'm B-ing M!"

Nicholas Dollak

One of my earliest memories was as I was learning new words, I got very confused by cuss words, particularly Darn and Damn. I couldn't remember which word was the "OK" word to use.

Imagine a 2 year old suddenly shouting "DAMN!" after tripping!

Potty Mouth (Still am today!)

when i was six i called my tehcer a fucker: i thought it meant a mean person

bobjoe

My friend Joe's cousins told thier baby brother that Fanequay (fan-ek-way) was a bad word and a few days later called him a piece of fanequay. He ran to his mom and told her and she said, thats nice dear. it sounded funny!

Anon

Once in 2nd grade i was asking my friend Yvonne if I could have some gum, I said"Please!! i swear if u give me some i will pay u back" and in our classrooms there was a poster that had the rules and it said "No Swearing" and she told on me and said i was swearing

Blah

when I was little, I asked my mom what the f-word was. After pushing her for a while, she told me but I though she said "folk". Having read a lot of Amelia Bedelia books... I said... so if you say folk with the s it's not a bad word but without one it was.

Anon

I used to believe "retro" was a vulgar word. It's odd now especially since I'm a retro gamer.

Retro Gamer who has a dosbox and like FPS's