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F-bombs explode

Reader respond to Aug. 29 column dealing with a teenage boy dropping the F-bomb on his old man.

To the Editor,

I’d like to respond to the Horner’s Corner column in the Aug. 29 Alberni Valley News, in which Neil Horner dealt with the first time his teenaged son had dropped the F-bomb to explode in Dad’s delicate ears.

It brought back a long-dead memory of the horrified look on my mother’s face when I let slip a series of newly-acquired nouns, adjectives and verbs within her earshot, while on leave from my first trip to sea in the Merchant Navy.

My vulgar vocabulary had rapidly developed with the everyday, some cases every sentence, use of such words on board ship.

I was in my mid-teens when I joined my first ship, probably no older than Mr. Horner’s son. By the time I swallowed the anchor over a quarter century later I’d probably learned to cuss in about 25 languages, but the F-bomb is universally used.

I always got a kick when some shipmates from certain Pacific countries pronounced words starting with “f” and “p” in a somewhat mixed-up fashion; the result was more pucks flying around than at a hockey shooting practice.

Horner’s Corner has appeared in the Parksville-Qualicum News for several years, and is always interesting.

Only recently he told how he inherited a parrot, and I cannot help but wonder if his son’s F-bomb was a result of listening to the feathered one’s fowl language ?

Bernie Smith,

Parksville