Fudge you? Why, Don't Mind If I Do.

I remember an English teacher I had in the tenth grade whose style of teaching was extremely old-fashioned. In fact, I was convinced she had time-traveled from another century, wandered onto our campus with it's fancy electricity and running water and was now absolutely perplexed as to what to do with these rapscallions she was in charge of educating. She spent a great deal of time just being exasperated by us, her high school students, and barely hid her disdain for our room full of miscreants. Hey look here! Rascally young people! No-good long-hairs, the lot of them! Have a seat, sonny, before I tan your hide!

The one thing that seemed to bother her the most was our foul language, in particular our use of the word fuck. And, while it was not a part of our everyday classroom vocabulary it was muttered enough during times of duress to cause her to explode one day, and ban the word from her classroom. From then on out, she scolded, if we had the urge to utter the profanity we could civilly substitute for it the word 'fudge.'

This proved to provide just the entertainment a bunch of smart-assed teenagers needed to get us through dreary days of Shakespearean soliloquies and group readings of The Scarlet Letter. Word games were fun, and we embraced it with all the gusto that a bunch of profanity-starved adolescents could muster. Soon we were moaning, "Oh, fudge!" upon hearing of an upcoming test, or using "Fudgin' hot" to describe the latest 'Kool and the Gang' album. And then there was the ever-popular, "That's fudged up! Fudge you, motherfudger."

Just a few weeks of these monkeyshines were enough to push her over the edge once again, and she proclaimed one day that the substitute had become just as notorious as the original, and we were now prohibited from using the word 'fudge.' This made us all giggle, and of course it was just too good an opportunity for some of us (not me, for once) to pass up. My memory is a little fuzzy on this, but I remember someone bringing up a visit to grandma's and baking up a nice batch of yummy fuck brownies. I feel bad about it now, but I recall hearing that the last anyone saw of that teacher she was running screaming from the campus, tearing up her credentials and cussing a blue streak.

I thought of that poor woman recently when I noticed that Kira and her friends were using the word 'frick' in their everyday, fourth-grade conversations. "Fricken homework" could be heard at the end of the school day and "What the frick?" greeted a lame 'American Idol' performance. As with many things our children do, it started out being unbelievably cute and amusing and then, after the hundredth time, quickly became downright annoying. Finally, the other day when she came home complaining she had to do a "Fricken report on a fricken disease" I put my foot down and told her it bothered me to hear her say ‘frick’ so often. She looked at me quizzically and asked, "Why? Is it a bad word?" "Well, no," I answered, "but I just don't think you should say it. No more saying 'frick!'"

As I was uttering those last words, my voice went up an octave and I could hear it coming out of my throat, sounding eerily like my tenth grade English teacher. It was mortifying, really, one of those moments that makes you feel so old, and it left me wondering, "Who the fudge am I turning into?"

Tweet Pin It