Here is a story about the time I got in trouble as a kid for repeatedly using the word “whorehouse.”

Christmas 1995. I was in my basement, watching a Vincent Price movie (as most 8 year olds do) when I heard the line “she died in a whorehouse.” This was a word I didn’t know.

I went up to the living room where the grown-ups were socializing and asked the first adult I saw, my aunt, what a whorehouse was. Her response was very vague but I left our conversation feeling quite certain that a whorehouse was a type of psychiatric hospital.

February 1996. My friend Guy and I were being driven to go sledding. Guy was doing a silly voice & bouncing up & down. His mom said “Guy calm down!” And I said with complete confidence “Yeah Guy! Don’t make us call the whorehouse!” Guy’s mom gasped “WHAT?” but somehow dropped it.

April 1996. In my Catholic School, we were each assigned to design a board game. I decided on a haunted house theme, but wanted to add some intrigue. I figured a haunted hospital would be inventive, and what was a more evocative word for hospital? Whorehouse.

When I showed it to my teacher and she saw it spelled “The Haunted Horehouse,” she said “Oh you mean “horror house.” I laughed “No, not “horror house.” It’s the Haunted WHOREhouse.”

She took me aside. “I don’t know where you heard this word,” she said gently, “but it is not appropriate for class.” I understood this to mean making light of mental illness wasn’t a nice thing to do and I agreed.

She recommended I take some time to rename my game. I wanted to retain the haunted element. But I wanted something more original than just “house, mansion of manor.” Then I remembered a movie poster I saw at our local cinema. It was called “The Bordello of Blood.”

The poster had an image of a big scary house on it, so clearly, bordello was a word for “big scary house.” So I proudly presented my new game to the class as “The Haunted Bordello.” This really, really happened.

The rest of the day is a blur, but it did include me being sent to the school secretary which was a weird choice. I explained the situation to her, then she excused herself & brought back more staff who I repeated the story for. I got the sense they wanted to laugh but couldn’t.

Long story short, that night my parents had to be like “Don’t use words without looking up their definitions first.” Which I do think is a good lesson.

I DID end up looking up “whorehouse” and “bordello” in the dictionary. The definition for both was “a brothel” which was ANOTHER word I didn’t know. The definition for “brothel” was “a prostitution house,” containing YET another mystery word and by then I frankly lost interest.

Oh by the way, I omitted SEVERAL other times I casually used the word “whorehouse” to peers and adults in those few months from December to April.

The End.