What did I know?

I was just a little kid, growing up California suburban in a Buffalo New York displaced formerly Catholic family.

I was born just before the War, WW II, when people were still careful about their language. There were things you just didn’t say, words you didn’t use. Society was stratified, middle class became the goal after the War, and the desire to social climb included the way we spoke.

The Upper Crust had a lock on respectability. “Nice people don’t use that kind of language.” “Don’t be vulgar.”

I, the little kid, didn’t know what language to avoid because I never heard it in the first place.

When my mother said, “Did you have a good BM?” I thought that was the name for it, what I did in the bathroom on the toilet. I thought maybe the “B” referred to “brown.”

When I was a little older, they let it slip that BM was the acceptably polite way of saying “Bowel Movement.” That seemed needlessly clumsy, and I stuck with BM.

I was apparently so removed and isolated from society at large, even from my own generation where kids were already using words that have since become so currently common that now-a-days you hear them everywhere, especially in movies, even on television, where the restraints have been removed almost entirely.

I say “almost,” because even the internet censors my messages and I have to learn what buttons to push to find out what words they find objectionable.

I still can’t use those words comfortably. I think I was like my father in that respect. He was an only child, raised in a family struggling toward middle class, went to Catholic school and, upon high school graduation, immediately entered the Jesuit Order where he stayed for six years until his faith ran out, entered a world unknown to him, his character already shaped toward kindness and forgiving, a gentle soul who, without my realizing it, became the template for my own verbal life. He didn’t use “those words,” even if he may have known them. He was over-educated in some ways, under-educated in others, managed to survive in this world without being a part of every aspect of it.

My mother, on the other hand, had come from solid middle class, was avidly aware of social status. “We don’t use those words.”

Since we never used them, I never knew what the words were that I shouldn’t use.

I do remember my mother telling a story with the relish of humor, how an older aunt had the reputation of “passing gas” in little bursts as she walked across the room and said over her shoulder, “Darn things!” She didn’t even say “damn!”

I grew up too much alone in splendid isolation as my language formed, so it’s still uncomfortable for me to use common speech.

I remember the awkward time, I think eighth grade, Catholic school, when they decided they should get us ready for high school in the outside world, and they’d better teach us something about the human body and sex. They separated out the boys from the girls, the nurse came in to show us the video, careful cartoons, she braced herself to use the word “penis” and talked about proper placement and consequent babies. For a long time I didn’t know any of the other words, though I have since made up for the omission.

I was less integrated into peer language than my brother who, three years older, was already in high school. He was a “teen ager” and would “hang out” with kids at his school, so he probably heard words that I didn’t, though he knew better than to bring them home to my hearing.

He’s another story, had his own limitations, plateaued in tenth grade, but would regale us with stories of his triumphs on the lunch court and students would gather around to hear him sing Elvis Presley. I suspected, because I already felt I had surpassed him intellectually, that some of his peers gathered to make fun of him. But since I wasn’t there, I couldn’t determine whether or not they just liked Elvis, and my brother Lee liked to get up on tables and gyrate.

He gave us a sample of his prowess, sounding as close to Elvis as he could, having heard him more often that I who alone at home put records on the record player and listened to opera and sang along.

Lee inflicted us with exaggeration, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, crockin’ all the time.”

I, pedantic, from my more limited Elvis experience, questioned the word “crockin.’” It just didn’t sound right.

“No,” he said, “it’s crockin’.”

He played the record. “See? It’s crockin’.”

I didn’t see. I thought, in his case, it wasn’t just a question of what’s between the ears, the ears themselves were not working right.

I said, “That doesn’t make sense. What does it mean? It’s probably “cryin’” unless there’s a new word I don’t know about.”

He said, “It’s crockin’.”

So the rest of my later life has been an effort to avoid being a pedant or a prude, to have a greater exposure to common language, and not simply eschew the vernacular argot of the street.