Growing up, as I did, in a cloud
of innocence, I held an unshakeable belief until about the age of 11 that the
'F-Word' was 'fart'. People talked of this elusive and illicit word beginning
with ‘F’ and I, having been forbidden from using the word 'fart' by my mother
who deemed it uncouth, put two and two together and came up with about 0.3.
This is sadly no longer the
case. Just as the media love to trumpet the sad fact that children are becoming
sexualised at a much younger age, so too are they exposed to verbal profanities
far earlier on than I was. At first I was horrified at the words used by
children, all of whom are under the age of ten, when they think I'm out of earshot. Now I have
become more used to it and - dare I admit it - even find their childish use and
understanding of adult words quite amusing.
My first experience of this came
this time last year when I spent three days at the school shadowing the
incumbent matron in order to learn the daily routine of the boarding house and
meet some of the children before I started in September. One of the nights I
spent there, my predecessor and I sat on the landing outside the girls’
dormitories waiting for them to settle down to sleep, when the tiny little face of one of the smallest Year Three girls appeared at the door.
‘Matron,’ she whispered,
conspiratorially, ‘just thought you ought to know, Rosie swore...’ she paused before adding as an afterthought, ‘and said
something that made Georgina cry.’
‘I see,’ said Matron, ‘and what
was it she said?’
‘The C-Word,’ said our little informant,
matter-of-factly.
I was taken aback. How could
this possibly be? I hadn’t become acquainted with this most vulgar of terms
until my mid-teenage years. Was a seven-year old standing before me, telling me
that ten-year olds were bandying the word about as if it were any other
common-or-garden playground insult?
Matron, from her years of
experience, knew better though.
‘Do you mean the C-R-A-P word,
sweetheart?’ she whispered back to the child, who took a moment to work out
what had just been spelled out to her.
‘C-R-A-P?’ she spelled it off on
her own fingers as she mouthed the letters, stringing them together into a word, ‘yes, yes,
that was it.’
Crisis averted. Although stern
words were, of course, had with Rosie.
One year on, I found myself in
the same position. As we left the dining hall the other week, a little girl
tugged on my hand and informed me quietly that one of the boys in the year
above had used a swear word.
‘A least, I think it was a
swearing word,’ she reflected.
My experience has taught me that
what the children consider to be swear words can range from the most ugly
insults to a simple ‘shut up’ or ‘buzz off’. The little girl in question was
from a very well brought-up, polite family and she was often easily shocked by
the behaviour of those around her. I decided to draw on the wisdom of the
previous matron to determine the strength of the offence.
‘Is there any way you can tell
me what he said without using the word itself? Do you think you could spell it
for me?’
She nodded. I crouched down and
she cupped her hands around my ear to whisper the vile utterance, as if even
spelling it aloud could pollute the air around us.
‘B-I-R-C-H… I think.’
Oh dear. Repercussions would
have to follow if he really had used the female-dog word. Yet a small part of
me was relieved it was only that. Far worse would have been the outcry had his
insult of choice been the unforgivable ‘F--- Y-E-W.’
No comments:
Post a Comment