Little Stories: Looking Up Dirty Words in the Dictionary

Two kids with their minds in the gutter (or, in one case, the bucket).

Little Stories, focusing on memories from my youth, is a recurring feature of Inconspicuous Consumption.

When I was a kid, I spent a fair amount of time doing what I assume most pre-internet kids did: looking up dirty words in dictionaries and encyclopedias. (As an aside: I was frequently fooled by the word “sextant,” which came right after “sex” in many encyclopedias. It sounded dirty — I mean, it started with the letters s-e-x, right? — so I would always read that entry and then be disappointed to learn that sextants are something else entirely. Eventually that sunk in and I stopped reading about them.)

Anyway: One day in third grade I was in our elementary school library, looking up dirty words with this kid John. We weren’t exactly friends, but we’d been classmates since kindergarten and knew each other reasonably well. John was big, goofy, and excitable, and also maybe a little slow — the kind of kid who talked too loud and accidentally broke things. As we looked up various words, like “sex,” “boner,” and “pee,” John’s chortling and snorting got louder and louder, and I began to worry that he’d get us in trouble with the librarian.