Terminology Timidity

The Prude has learned that terms and their definitions are changing every day.

The meaning of  ‘gay’ has metamorphosiszed at least 3 times in her life and she has gotten it wrong at each stage.

She hesitates to label anything ‘bad’ since she believes at some point in the last couple of decades it meant ‘good’ and isn’t sure if it now means ‘bad’ again. Or whether it is a adjective or a noun.

A dog was your 4-legged best friend or a distasteful term for a not-perfectly-lovely woman but now is what you call your good buddy.

Her children announced they would never again show their faces in public when The Prude asked to try on some thongs at the store.

While 'raw' used to to mean 'opposite of cooked', 'tight' used to be shoes that pinched or to describe a tipsy person and 'tripping' was what a tipsy person in tight shoes often did,

now 'raw' and 'tight' are considered compliments and 'tripping' refers to messing up.

But 2 words she would have considered sacrosanct, unambiguous and completely comprehensible are:

One, and

Refill.

But she was wrong.

At drive-through windows of fast food establishments, she always asks for ONE extra catsup.

She has never ever EVER  been given ONE catsup.

She gets this many:

Or more.

And when she purchased this handy insect repeller, she was delighted to note that it came with a REFILL.

She assumed ‘refill’ meant ‘fill again’ with the deduction being that when repellant that filled the repeller was empty she could REFILL it with the REFILL.

She was–you guessed it–wrong.

The insect repeller, when she first cracked it open, contained nothing but air molecules. 

She filled it for the first time with something called a refill but that The Prude would label a ‘First Fill’.

Wrong.

My bad.