I don’t think we were unique in our pastime of crossing out words in paperbacks and writing in dirty ones. We certainly knew more words than our actual experience would have or should have indicated. For a brief period around grade 7, it was a favourite way to spend our time; sleepovers would be preoccupied with choosing the most lascivious and explicit substitutions and then reading back entire passages, accompanied by whoops of laughter and delighted shock. Monday morning, the now rather more offensive books would accompany spelling and English text books back to school, to be shared with what would prove to be eager classmates.

The only person who ever found one of these masterpieces was our math teacher, Mr. Lencz. I remember he seemed rather shocked that a group of girls would have produced such a thing (personally, I think it’s far more likely a group of girls would have) and immediately confiscated the material and gave us lunch time detentions. Needless to say, this hardly deterred us, and we churned out many more crude and probably mostly nonsensical titles.