Maddie does not drink nine coffees a day

My only memory of Neopets is my friend getting banned

I was around ten years old at the time. Please remember that English is my second language (ESL), and I had barely learnt any as a child, only I remember one of my friends walking up to me and asking, "Hey. You know English right?"

I had immigrated to New Zealand for a few years before coming back. "A bit," I said, nodding.

She explained to me that she had been playing a game called Neopets, except she had gotten banned and was terribly confused as to why.

"I wrote C-U-M in the chat," she said. "But it's not even a bad word. It's just latin for 'with', right?"

The two of us grabbed an English dictionary and started pouring over it. At the end of the session, we agreed: 'Cum' simply meant 'with' or 'and'. There was nothing wrong with what she typed.

"You got banned," I said.

"I got banned," she replied.

"Weird."

I never thought about it again until I moved back to New Zealand and all the teenage boys around me started shouting the latin word for 'with'.

#journal #neopets