I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means

Last week at dinner, I was telling my parents how Tim had been chased by a pig out in Arizona. Without missing a beat, my mother enquired (and she was completely serious), "Why was a cop chasing Tim?"

After we picked Rose up from the floor where she was rolling around laughing, and I stopped choking on my salad, we asked my mother why she thought I meant a cop. Her brother was a cop, and nobody in our family has ever called a police officer a pig (maybe not so much because of my uncle, but more because we are not extras on an episode of Dragnet).

"Well," she offered, "I didn't think you actually meant a real pig!"

In her defense, she comes by it honestly. Her mother was forever coming up with some doozies. The Pocono mountains were the Pinocchio mountains and her nephew was training at Pepsi-cola in Florida.

And her mother before her, as family legend has it, once told a waiter that she didn't want the sorbet, or intermezzo course, he was trying to serve her before her entree. Except that she yelled it to him across a crowded restaurant and she didn't exactly say intermezzo course...she called it intercourse.

Fortunately, Tim cannot say much about my family's propensity to misuse words, since it runs in his family too.

For many years, my mother was the director of a choral group called The Interludes. They were a fun, and let's say, um, colorful group of people that Tim decided should more aptly be named The Quaaludes. Sadly, he neglected to tell his mother that was not their actual name, and one day she innocently asked my mom how her "Quaaludes" were. Even more sadly for Tim, he was within striking distance of both moms at the time.

Not to be outdone, his brother Tom had the misfortune to refer to something as "friggin" in their mother's presence. When she rebuked him for his foul language, he adopted his best wide-eyed, innocent look and explained that, contrary to being a bad word, it came from the Latin meaning "to hit".

Congratulating himself on his narrow escape from a lecture, he went on his merry way only to be confronted by his mom about a month later.

Seems she had let the word fly at work to refer to a jammed copier that needed "hitting". Her boss, shocked, asked her if she knew what the word meant, and then had to delicately explain to her that it was slang for another word that began with the letter F.

This probably wouldn't have been too bad if not for the fact that she worked in a church rectory and her boss was a priest.

And the cycle continues...Just a few weeks ago, Rose and I were on the phone one morning and she asked what Tim and I were doing. Kidding around, I told her that we had just had "breckie".

"What?!!?" she shrieked, "Too much information!"

"Well, you asked," I replied, perplexed as to why she found my shorthand for breakfast so offensive.

"Yes, but I did not need to know that." I could all but hear her shudder.

Turns out, she actually thought I had told her we had had a "quickie".

You can't escape your genes.