I'm sure all of us have been called an unpleasant name. I'm not talking about 'dumb' or 'stupid', I'm talking about those names that are spiked like ink, taking years to rub off. What if I told you that the first time I was called a 'female dog' was by my little brother?

I've never been one to swear. I mean, of course I can spit out a few choice ones when the time is right, but I tend to prefer to talk in less vulgar ways. In fact, I think it was because of my brother that I never swore. Sure, my dad swears a little, especially when he's angry- but my mom and I are similar in the fact that we never swear. To peoples' faces, anyways. I was trying so hard to protect my own brother from "raw language" that I refrained from calling him anything that I ever heard. That's why I was so surprised when one day he tripped on the bottom corner of our kitchen island and a whole stream of curses flowed out of his dirty mouth. My brother, by the way, was about 9 years old.

But the reason why I need to learn to be comfortable swearing is because the popular do this all the time. For some of the people in my school if you take out the F word (see, I'm not even comfortable in TYPING bad words!), that's about half their vocabulary. And YES, you CAN blame them. I don't care what kind of upbringing they've had, I know no culture where it is proper to swear in everyday conversation.

Can I do it? Probably not. I think I've only called somebody (again, this is in front of their face) something extremely nasty once, and that's because he constantly bombarded my every day by calling me a b****. (I'm not even kidding when I say I think he has a crush on me). I've said 'hell' about once out-of-context during a particularly confusing P.E. game. But other than that, I'm probably have one of the cleanest vocabularies that the world has ever known.

I'm not going to ask myself to practice in a mirror. Actually, that would be kind of funny- I can almost imagine myself swearing AT myself for hours, perfect those four letter words until I could say them in my sleep. The key word here is almost. All I'm asking myself is that if the time is ripe for a juicy swear, I won't hold it back. Unless it's for my parents, of course.

SLANG

My family pretty much doesn't know anything about slang or what I'll call 'sex terms'. But at school, even an independent girl like me tends to hear certain phrases repeated over and over. For example, this year it was the number '69'. Guys were signing each others yearbooks with something like this: 'call me (696)696-6969' and cracking up.

Thankfully, I'm smart enough to know that you NEVER ask somebody what a word or phrase means if they giggle pervertedly after it. In fact, don't ask them at all- you'll end up looking so out of the loop. For example, one time a group of people I was talking to started talking about dildos. And yeah, I didn't know what that meant. Sue me. Of course, I didn't ask then either- but I guess the blank stare was a dead giveaway. So here's my newest tip- are people talking about things you don't understand? Just start nodding and agreeing. THIS IS A TIP THAT WILL WORK THROUGHOUT YOUR LIFE.

Then I stumbled upon the slang mecca known as Urban Dictionary (urbandictionary.com). They have a comprehensive dictionary of every dirty meaning of every word in the history of the universe. Of course I searched 69, and got a little nauseous. I searched some other words, and decided that I would try to erase my memory of the past five minutes.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE. If you search ANYTHING via Urban Dictionary, use a proxy browser. A proxy browser is basically private browsing, which means that your parents can't track it. (try searching 'proxy browser' in google for some options). Believe me, you do not want your parents to find you searching up stuff like this. Even if it is for a completely innocent reason (like mine was), you cannot explain yourself for searching that kind of stuff. You might even spark "the talk" or if you're really unlucky "the talk 2". And EVERYTHING on there is perverted, so don't bother trying to search trivial stuff without a proxy. I searched 'cherry pie' and GOD was I disgusted.