Packages, Nuts, Balls, and Big Ones

After I graduated from college, I didn't want to go back home to Eureka right away.  I couch surfed for a little over two weeks, but then finally decided it was time to spend some time with my family.  I met up with my mom and we spent the night at my aunt's house in San Rafael before heading up to Humboldt County.

We ended up talking about what I am going to do now, where I should apply for jobs, and then I remembered my student loans.

"Don't worry about it," my Mom said.  "You really don't have to pay back that much."  Then she started talking about my brother, who goes to the school I just graduated from.  Apparently he will have even more debt than I do when he finishes college in two years.

"But he just got a letter about financial aid.  I'm not sure how much he's getting, though; I want to see his package!"

Within seconds we were cracking up.  This isn't the first time my mom has said something that could have been interpreted in more than one way, either.

Once my mom was grocery shopping and confronted a worker in one of the aisles and asked him a question.  "Excuse me, sir, where are your nuts?"

But "like mother, like daughter" the saying goes.  I have had many accidental inappropriate utterances of my own.

Once I was playing bingo at a campground with a few friends.  Any serious bingo player knows that many different formations are used to make the game more interesting.  Instead of just a line, sometimes players aim to mark all four corners, an X, or many other shapes. 

This particular game we were trying to make the shape of a field goal.  In addition to the field goal shape, we needed to have one space marked to look like a football going through the goal. 

There are six spaces that will work for the football, so it's really not that hard to get, but when I marked one of the spaces I was excited nonetheless.  "I have a ball!" I told my friends.  They didn't share my enthusiasm, but when the next number called was another one of those six spaces inside of the field goal, I got even more excited.

"I have two balls!"  I yelled.  My friends looked away and acted like they didn't know me.

Another story along these lines, perhaps my favorite, occurred a couple months ago at a McDonald's.  I was there with two guy friends and two girl friends.  Both of the guys got french fries, and I don't really like fast food so I didn't buy anything. 

Of course, though, when my friend was sitting across from me eating his small fry, I stole some.  After we had been sitting there talking and eating for a while, my other guy friend pulled his fries out of his bag, which is when I saw that he had bought a large fry.

"Why have I been eating his when you have a big one?!" I exclaimed.  And immediately realized I shouldn't have said that to two college guys.

I guess these things are just inevitable these days.  "Package didn't mean that back in the day," my mom told me on our drive back to Eureka yesterday.  One of the interesting things about modern English, I realized, is that almost any word can be interpreted as either phallic or a yonic.  And mostly phallic, since we do live in a phallocracy (thanks, Lit Theory).

So I don't think that I say these things is really my fault.  It's really the fault of our language.  Maybe I should start talking a little bit more quietly, though...