Uptight Men Wrote the Dictionary

ACTION ALERT: please e-mail Merrian-Webster after reading this tale of a legendarily embarrassing but delightfully naughty family Scrabble match, to save yourselves from such moments.

There is a scene in “Foul Play” wherein some nice old ladies are playing Scrabble. Being a classic Chevy Chase / Goldie Hawn late ‘70's movie, no gag is left unturned in any scene and it’s quickly revealed that these nice old ladies are spelling dirty words, which leads to a debate between them as to whether or not “Mutherfucker” has a hyphen. And it’s fitting that these nice old ladies debated this grammatical quandary, as dictionaries at the time didn’t include these kinds of words.

Or ours didn’t, anyway. We looked.

“Foul Play” is my mother’s favorite movie. She, for the record, felt that “Mutherfucker” was not hyphenated, but that it was in fact misspelled.

I concur.

And this brings me back to a long-ago game of Scrabble when I was 8 or 9 years old and, incredibly, somehow beating the single most literate person I have ever met in my life. My Mom devours crossword puzzles on a daily basis; she has a dictionary made especially for the “extraordinarily literate”; she took a 1st grade assignment to recite a poem aloud for the class as an exciting opportunity to endear herself to her classmates by memorizing and reciting the entirety of Poe’s “The Raven.”

In short, my Mom is a holy terror at Scrabble and was always assumed unbeatable. She will spell words that you think are made up and, with only a mild air of impatience for doubting her, will then sit there beatifically as you look it up to find that, yes, beaze is a word, and it does mean “to dry in the sun,” and she got the damn Z on a triple word score, too, and now she’s killing you. Again.

Except for this one day, when I was winning by a good margin, and I was just a kid.

It was dumb luck, really. Mom had been getting terrible letters; I’d had a streak of good ones that led to simple words and good scores. Scrabble is the one game in which my Mom is actually competitive, too, so I can hardly blame her for taking advantage of the triple word score with C-U-N-T.

I mean, the C is worth 3 points. And it was the best play she had going for her.

The other thing my mother had taught us about Scrabble, though, is that the word must be a “real” word, and the judge and jury of that realness was our dictionary. So when I saw this word, a tiny one-syllable word I’d never seen before, I simply announced, “Mommy, CUNT (pronounced: koont) is not a word.”

Our conversation then went something like this:

Mommy: Well, Leslie, it’s pronounced “cunt,” and it is a word, but it’s not a very nice word so we don’t say it out loud.
Me: What does it mean?
Mommy: Well… it’s a very bad word for “vagina.”
Me: Ew, vagina! I think “vagina” sounds way worse than “koont.”
Mommy: Well… OK, you don’t have to say either of them, but definitely don’t say “cunt.”
Me (doubtful): I’m going to look it up.
Mommy: OK

And, incredibly, the word “cunt” was not actually in our dictionary. Victory! Or so I thought.

Mommy: Well, some words that are really words aren’t actually in the dictionary.

Now, this made me suspicious. How on earth could a word exist without being in the dictionary? I smelled some actual foul play here, and decided to bring in an impartial judge.

Me: I’m going to ask Daddy.
Mommy: No, no! Let’s not ask Daddy, he’s… busy.
Me: But the word isn’t in the dictionary, and that’s the rule.
Mommy: Leslie, do you really think that I’d make up a word just to try to beat you at Scrabble?

I thought about this. And the answer was: no, I really didn’t. My Mom wasn’t a cheater. A pottymouth with a fluid notion of Scrabble rules, maybe; but a cheater, no way. And she had looked both surprised and, might I add, rather indignant that “cunt” wasn’t in the dictionary.

So I let the play stand. And the universe punished her with a Q with no U and all consonants the whole game and I ended up winning anyway, which may also be attributed to the fact that she was distracted due to trying to move the game along before Dad came in and saw the board.

Or, you know, just the upper right-hand corner of the board, where the triple word score is.

And so we will flash forward 30 years, when I was in a heated match of Scrabble with both of my parents and, having suffered for multiple plays by having a Q in my rack without the damn U, and being tired of playing “Qi” every time that happens, I’d waited it out. And I finally had the U, and I had the opportunity for a double word score. And so, proudly, I spelled:

Q-U-E-E-F

My Dad gave me a look, and said, “Queef? Really?”

Oh, dear. This might be awkward.

But I then realized that the look wasn’t so much a “I can’t believe you spelled that” so much as it was the same look I’d given my Mom 30 years before, as he then said, “Queef is not a word.”

Um… OK, now this was going to be really awkward. Our conversation then went something like this:

Me (trying not to laugh): Oh, “queef” is a word, all right. Come on, Mom, back me up here.

Mom: Queef? What is a queef? That is not a word, Leslie.

I couldn’t believe it. How could the woman who uses the word “elan” in everyday conversation and talks about Daniel Day Lewis’ “attractive physique” and, more to the point, has a both pretty impressive grasp of naughty words in general and the bilogical apparatus to actually issue a queef not know this word?

Me: OK, I can’t believe that you don’t know this word, but I swear, it is a word, you guys, seriously! Look it up.

And so we turned to the trusty dictionary again — a more recent dictionary than the one we’d had when I was a kid — and that freaking dictionary failed us. Again. For cuntsakes, Merriam-Webster, get the stick out of your bunghole and put some filthy queefing words in your motherfucking dictionary, if only to spare people like me and my Mom these embarrassing Scrabble moments.

And then our conversation went from awkward to really awkward:

Me: OK, seriously though, it is a word. Have you really never heard this word?
Dad: No, so what is a “queef” then?
Me (looking sideways): Well, it’s a vaginal fart.

My Dad then made that same annoyed sigh that he used to make when my sister and I were fooling around in Church. And my Mom burst into the uproarious laughter that she always does when something this naughtily absurd surfaces around the family table.

Dad: Leslie, that is not a real word.
Me: Dad, of course it’s a real word! It’s a real thing, isn’t it? Are you saying that a queef doesn’t exist? Have you never encountered a queef?
Mom: (laughing, harder)
Dad: (loud sigh)
Me: Look, all I’m saying is that the phenomena of a queef is very real, and so of course there’s a word for it, just like there’s a word for fart.

Mom, still laughing.
Dad, shaking his head and sighing.

Me: Seriously, you guys, if penises had farts coming out of them I guarantee you that there would be a word for it, and it would be in the freaking dictionary*, because the dictionary — like every other old text we hold sacred — was written by a bunch of entitled men!

Unfortunately, I had now strayed into the world of gender equality (or, as it’s known in my family, “Leslie goes all political”), and that world is not welcome around the Scrabble table.

I then insisted that I be allowed to go look it up online, but unfortunately the only online dictionary I could find with the word “queef” in it at the time was Urban Dictionary - which I felt was better than nothing - so I printed out the page and brought it back downstairs.

More unfortunately, neither of my parents were convinced that a site called “Urban Dictionary” was an acceptable Scrabble resource, particularly when my Mom took the printout and started reading aloud.

My Dad then excused himself to head to the bar, which is conveniently located a few steps away from the game table. So he wasn’t out of earshot, but he was far enough away that he could pretend that this absurd conversation about a previously unknown vaginal phenomena wasn’t happening with his wife gleefully participating.

I think it was definition #3 that sealed my fate. Once my Mom got to the part about Southern ladies tooting their TOOTS, they both decided that I was simply not allowed to play this made-up-sounding word, whether or not it was in fact a word that was used by the Urban Dictionarians to describe an allegedly refreshing self-propelled Southernmost ladyfolk breeze.

I tried to appeal to my Mom’s sense of fairness by reminding her of that long-ago Scrabble game in which “cunt” hadn’t been in the dictionary, but it was to no avail. I was outvoted.

And so I played “queen” instead, which cost me 6 points because the F is worth 4 and the N is only worth one. Boo.

And this is why I have decided to make it my mission to get this word into the dictionary, because truthfully, “queef” is a pretty excellent Scrabble move in addition to being a bona fide vaginal occurrence. Merriam-Webster has this to say about how words get added to the dictionary:

Since words are entered into the dictionary on the basis of actual usage, the best way to get a word in the dictionary is to use it and to encourage others (especially professional writers and editors) to use it.

If you’d like to join me in my Queefing Quest, here’s how:

1) Go to the Merriam-Webster Facebook page
2) Either post a link to this blog post to the Wall, or send it to them in a Message
3) Drive it home by simply asking, on the Wall or in a Message, that they add the word “Queef” to the dictionary.
4) Go ahead and use this word, and encourage others to use it.

You’ll be glad you did the next time your Scrabble or Words with Friends rack has a Q-U-E-E- and there’s an open F on the board. Trust me on this one.

(*And it would probably be a really awesome word, too, like “peenphoon!” Not that I’m in any way critiquing the word “queef,” which I find charming, and rather fun to say.)