“Gerald Maines lived across the hall from a woman named Benna, who four minutes into any conversation always managed to say the word penis. He was not a prude, but, nonetheless, it made him wince. He worked with children all day, taught a kind of aerobics to pre-schoolers, and the most extreme language he was likely to hear seemed to him to be in code, in acronyms, or maybe even in German - boo-boo, finky, peenick - words that were difficult to figure out even in context, and words, therefore, from which he felt quite safe. He suspected it was not unlike people he knew who hated operas in translation. ‘Believe me,’ they would explain, ‘you just don’t want to know what they’re saying.”
Lorrie Moore, Anagrams
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