12-year-old Teddy told his 10-year-old brother, Johnny, that to impress their peer group they had to start incorporating cursewords into their speech, even at home.
"We can't do that," Johnny said, "Mom would hit the ceiling if she heard us swearing." Their mother was sweet and loving, yet also very socially conservative and a strict disciplinarian.
"Not if we just work it into our speech gradually," Teddy explained, "Then Mom would realize that it's just the normal way people talk these days."
Johnny looked doubtful. "How do we do that?"
"We'll start out with real mild cursewords, I'll take 'hell' and you take 'ass,' we can just slip them into what we say naturally, then Mom will understand they're not any big deal," Teddy insisted.
Just then their mother called upstairs, telling the boys to come down to the kitchen so she could fix them breakfast, it being a Saturday morning. When they arrived, she cheerfully asked Teddy what he would like for breakfast.
He muttered, "What the hell, I'll just have some cornflakes."
His mother exploded angrily. "What did you just say, young man?" She grabbed a wooden spoon, yanked down his PJ bottoms and soundly smacked his bare behind a couple dozen times, leaving him bawling and blubbering. "Now you get back to your room and don't leave it until I call you for lunch, you can just skip breakfast!"
"Yes, ma'am," he sobbed, then pulled up the PJ bottoms and headed upstairs.
She turned to Johnny and gave him a warm smile. "I'm sorry about that unpleasantness, honey, so what would like for breakfast?"
He replied, "You can bet your ass it's not cornflakes."
(I took the boys' names from the Brewster brothers in "Arsenic and Old Lace.") --C.K. | 
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