One of them repeated it to his mother that night. I never saw him again. His parents were to pull him out of that school, because of my joke, and he never even came back to say goodbye.

I was interrogated the next morning by the headmistress and the principal, who had just bought the school and was intent on maximizing every drop of profit from it before she sold it to property developers the following year.

I had forgotten about the joke. They kept asking me if I knew any “four-letter words” and, while I had not run across that term before, I had an enormous vocabulary, and it was the kind of thing that teachers asked eight-year-olds, so I ran through every word made of four letters I could think of, until they told me to shut up, and asked me about rude jokes and where I had heard them, and to whom exactly I had repeated them.

That night, after school, my mother was summoned to a meeting with the headmistress and the principal. She came home and informed me that she had been told that I had said something so terrible, so awful, that the headmistress and the principal would not actually repeat it. What was it?

I was scared to answer, so I whispered it to her.

I had said fuck.

“You must never ever say that again,” said my mother. “That is the worst thing that you can say.”

She informed me that she had been told that I would have been expelled—the ultimate punishment—from the little school that night, but, because the other boy had already been removed from that seething den of scatological iniquity by his parents, the principal had announced, with regret, that she was not prepared to lose two sets of school fees. And so I was spared.

I learned two very important lessons from this.

The first was that you must be extremely selective when it comes to your audience.

And the second is that words have power.

CHILDREN ARE A relatively powerless minority, and, like all oppressed people, they know more about their oppressors than their oppressors know about them. Information is currency, and information that will allow you to decode the language, motivations and behavior of the occupying forces, on whom you are uniquely dependent for food, for warmth, for happiness, is the most valuable information of all.

Children are extremely interested in adult behavior. They want to know about us.

Their interest in the precise mechanics of peculiarly adult behavior is limited. All too often it seems repellent, or dull. A drunk on the pavement is something you do not need to see, and part of a world you do not wish to be part of, so you look away.

Children are very good at looking away.

I DO NOT think I liked being a child very much. It seemed like something one was intended to endure, not enjoy: a fifteen-year-long sentence to a world less interesting than the one that the other race inhabited.