Some words, and the first time I heard them

Something I find rather interesting when looking back on my life so far is trying to figure out where I picked up certain skills and knowledge. Of course I can’t remember most of these things because when you’re a kid, you don’t really pay attention to most of this stuff because it’s not the kind of thing you would find that noteworthy or would ever imagine yourself wanting to look back on. For this reason I can’t really remember a whole lot about where I learned skills as a kid, however there are certain words that I can vividly remember where and when I learned them, and what the whole process was like. Here are some examples.

I will note that since I will probably remember more examples as I go about my daily life in the future, this page is subject to change at any time to accommodate for new examples being added. For this reason I will try to include a date on each example saying when it was added to the page. In fact at the time of me posting this article I’m can only really remember the first two you see as well as one I probably will never post here, although I’m pretty sure there are more I’m just not thinking of at the moment.

This is one that it occurred to on March 26th, 2018 where and when I heard this word for the first time. I was watching PBS Kids one day as a young child, maybe four or five years old. (I still have my original television set from that time, and it still works!) I remember watching the end to Clifford The Big Red Dog when a message at the end advertised the PBS Kids website, but I didn’t understand was that in addition to giving the URL, it also gave something I had never heard of before: An “AOL Keyword”, saying that you could use the AOL keyword “PBS Kids”. For one thing I had no idea what an AOL was, but even stranger I couldn’t figure out what it meant by keyword. I remember thinking about skeleton keys, and I may have been thinking along the lines of passwords, which led me to believe that the AOL Keyword was something you needed to get into some secret service or something. I remember asking my mom immediately after what a keyword was and while I can’t remember how the conversation went I remember not understanding any of it.

I don’t think I was using search engines at that time as I first started using Yahoo! When I got my first E-Mail account there at about the age of seven or so, and before that I don’t really remember using the Internet for a whole lot. So I quickly forgot about it until for some reason it just randomly popped into my head one day “Oh yeah! This is where I first heard the word keyword!”. I’ve heard somewhere that Clifford The Big Red Dog stopped using the AOL Keyword ending in 2003, but I remember seeing it on TV for the first in my second house, which I moved into in 2004. So I guess either however said that was wrong or very likely my local PBS station was a bit behind on keeping up with the rest of the network.

The great thing about this example is, I don’t even have to remember it anymore because someone uploaded a recording of the bumper to YouTube, and it’s EXACTLY what I remember seeing as a young child, minus the Kix and Chuck E. Cheese's commercials. And I’m not going to lie, there is more nostalgia in this 2-minute YouTube video and versions one and two from this video for me than pretty much any of my school memories. So if you want to see what I’m talking about, here you go!

There’s not really a whole lot I can say about this one at the moment other than I first saw it on the Web sometime between 2007-2010 at the ages of six to nine. And even then that year range is rather lax, it could have been any earlier or later than that even. What I do remember however is seeing the word and not knowing what it meant, and then thinking it was is an okay word, I used it in front of my mom. Between the ages of six to nine. As you can imagine she told me off, and after that I was well aware that it was a bad word. The reason I remember this swear word in particular so well is that I remember the time I read it that caused me to say it, I had already been on the Internet for sometime, and I had never seen that word before. But now that I knew it was a bad word, I began seeing it literally everywhere.

A similar thing happened to me with an old Japanese commercial for a Zelda game I saw when I was about ten or eleven. I was looking through the comments when I saw someone give “lyrics” to the video, pretending that the Japanese lyrics were in English. I thought it was very funny, so I called my mom into my room so I could sing to her the lyrics I found. I started and she had absolutely no idea of what I was doing, but she then stopped in her tracks when she heard me sing the misheard lyric at the 20 second mark… aaaand within seconds I was grounded and told very, VERY seriously to never say that word to anyone else, ever again in my life. For the record I still haven’t, but mostly because I have never found a need to.

If you want to see what I am talking about, here is the original video, though whether or not it’s the same upload with the original comment down there somewhere, I can’t say for sure. Anyways, if you want to know the word I said that day, play through the 20 second to 21 second mark with your dirtiest mind and see what comes up. Nowadays it’s honestly not that bad if you’re over the age of fifteen or sixteen, but for someone who still thought babies came from space or something, it’s not an ideal word to know.

Argot

Page created: Monday, March 26th, 2018

Page last updated: Monday, March 26th, 2018