Hey, You Impolite Lady!

Spelling is a lost art. A simple switching of two letters, or adding one where it shouldn’t be, can make all the difference in the meaning of the word. Here’s a little story to illustrate the point:

My daughter E wrote a report in class last week about Marco Polo. She had to describe how he dressed, and so she wrote about how he wore furs and, oh, I don’t know, puffy shirts and knickers or something. I am not up on the fashion scene of the 1200’s. Anyway, instead of writing “wore” to say he wore puffy shirts and knickers, she wrote “whore.” An innocent enough mistake at the age of nine, especially for a kid who is very fond of H’s.

Her teacher brought back the report to her after she finished reviewing it so my daughter could make corrections. And she told E that the word she wrote, “whore,” was a bad word and she needed to change the spelling. E, who, courtesy of another kid in her class, is well versed in George Carlin’s list of dirty words, but whore was a new one to her. So she asked her teacher what it meant. (Really, the story could end there if you knew the teacher. I’ll give you the brief version. She is a spinster woman from the northern part of Sri Lanka, and she is about my daughter’s height. And she blinks a lot.) Her teacher thought for a moment and said, “It is not a nice word. It is an impolite lady.”

E told me about her wore/whore mistake over dinner, and I snorted over the impolite lady bit.

“Well, it means a bit more than an impolite lady,” I said to E.
“What does it mean, then?” she asked me.
“You remember when we talked about sex?” I asked her. Yes, we have had that conversation, and it is a story for another day.
“Yes.” E looked at me with the big eyes.
“Well, sometimes, when a man isn’t married, he might still want to have sex. And a whore, she is a woman who, um, the man pays her money to have sex with her.” E thought about that for a moment. “It’s not a very nice thing to call someone,” I told her, “And there are a couple of other words for the same thing. One of them is prostitute. Or a slut. Have you ever heard those words?”
“Nope, but I have now,” E answered.

It was a banner day. Not only did she learn she was a lousy speller from her teacher, but then she came home and learned a couple more swear words from me. I am so glad I am arming her for the day when she uses them against me. Why worry about what bad words she will learn at school when I can teach them to her myself? I gave homeschooling a whole new meaning.