The black population of my elementary school equaled zero. The only minority was an adopted Korean boy named Timmy. White bred? White trash. So upon hearing young master Poindexter’s grumblings, it never occurred to me that his choice of vocabulary had anything to do with race. Hell, I didn’t even know that "race" meant anything outside of horses, Indy cars and the Olympics. As near as I could tell, "nigger" was just a harsher version of "jerk." I felt completely justified in firing the word at Richard for being one. I was, of course brusquely corrected by Mrs. Lewis for saying a bad word.

At this point in my life, there were only two kinds of words – words that anybody was allowed to say and words that only grownups were allowed to say. The latter of these, of course consisted of the f-word, the s-word, the b-word, the p-word, the a-word and the d-word. Kids weren’t allowed to say them simply because they were swear words. That was all. We didn’t worry about context, sensitivity, or correctness (political or otherwise). A bad word was a bad word and it warranted punishment, no matter how you used it. Therefore, I merely assumed that I was being punished for swearing when I called Richard a nigger.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Lewis never fully explained to me that there was a deeper reason why the n-word was a swear. She didn’t impress upon me that calling somebody the n-word was actually worse than calling somebody an f-ing a-hole. And would I really have believed her? I mean, what could possibly be worse than calling somebody an f-ing anything? So it’s really no surprise that a year later in the second grade, I was punished again for calling Richard Shaw a nigger. The kid was probably trying to steal my f-ing pencils like he always did. I had to stay inside with my head down during recess for a whole day. And yet again, I was never really told why I was in need of correction – at least not by any teacher. It took a red-headed, freckle-faced kindergartner to explain to me that "nigger" wasn’t really a swear, but it was "a bad word that people called blacks."

I was in fifth grade before I could finally begin to understand the full implications of the n-word. My forming mind just couldn’t wrap itself around the idea that a word could be bad for any reason other than being a swear. If "nigger" wasn’t a swear, then why was it bad? And why was it only bad because of how it applied to certain people? Of course, hearing black people in movies calling each other "nigger" didn’t help any. (In my hometown, everybody dropped their R’s, so I never distinguished between "nigger" and "nigga".) Seeing Niger on a map was always good for a quick laugh. But, all the same, by fifth grade, I had at least accepted that "nigger" was a word to be avoided, even when there weren’t grownups around who could get me in trouble.

Sixth grade would begin a whole new era of confusion because of the word, "fag." As long as I had been learning slang words from older kids on the playground, "fag" and "faggot" meant one thing and one thing only: a sissy. If a kid started crying when he got a tiny bruise or scrape, we called him a fag. And if a parent or teacher scolded us for it, we’d just laugh, replying, "What? I called him a bundle of sticks." Hey it was in the dictionary. I had no idea what a "homosexual" was. I knew that it meant the same thing as "gay", but I attached no meaning to either word. I didn’t start seeing connections between "gay," "homo," and "fag" until my principal gave us boys a talking-to.

Around 1989, my friends and I got it in our heads that we needed a rite of passage, a test of endurance, a mark of strength. We decided that in order to prove your worth you had to scratch the back of your hand 200 times. No pansy-ass, girly scratching either. You had to dig your nails into your flesh. By about the 50th scratch, you had broken through all outer layers of skin and were now scratching the pulp underneath. This ritual was appropriately dubbed, The Fag Test. The resulting blemish turned pus-yellow and didn’t heal for about a year, but having the mark proved you weren’t a fag. Looking closely, I can still see the remnant scar from my own personal fag test. Finally some kid’s mom called the principal who immediately walked in and admonished the class. "I understand that you boys are scratching your hands to make some kind of mark, and if you don’t have that mark, it means you’re gay?" We all kind of looked sideways at each other, thinking the same thing: "No... It means you’re a fag."

We eventually outgrew the fag tests, but we never gave up using the word to mock crybabies and momma’s boys. It was the early 90’s and the gay pride movement really hadn’t picked up steam yet. I wasn’t corrected until I left my small hick town in Maine for Emerson College in Boston. With a larger-than-average gay population, if you said "fag" there they’d tear you a new asshole... I mean, well, you know. Luckily I caught on before I could incriminate myself, but once again, context turned an otherwise harmless sneer into an offensive slur with meanings and connotations that seem disproportionate to the size of the word.

These were the two big stumbling blocks of my vocabularic life... though there were others – thinking "queer" really just meant "strange"; greeting my friends by saying "Hey mook," only to find out that apparently the word was a lighter form of "nigger"; asking a car dealer if the price was firm or if I could "chew" him down, not realizing that my bigoted grandfather, years earlier had actually said, "Jew him down," and now I was guilty of being anti-Semitic. English was hard enough to learn without attaching hidden meanings to words that go way beyond the Webster definition. I managed to get through it all without getting my butt kicked, but I must say, I miss the good old days when I could call my good friend an f-ing faggot and not have to worry about who might overhear.