What was Jerome's Vulgar?

Jerome was this kid in my German class in high school. We lived in a military town, so a lot of the kids had lived overseas. Jerome had spent three years in Germany. He took German because he had to have a foreign language to graduate, and he figured it would easy.

Turned out, he knew more slang than grammar. He had a hard time with verb tenses and noun genders. But who doesn't? Whose great idea was it to randomly give nouns invisible attributes that change all the words around them?

What Jerome exceled at, though, was cursing. He told us that if we really wanted to be able to talk to people in Germany, we had to know how to swear. He wrote out all the swear words he could think of and made photocopies in the library. You could get a copy for a buck. But he wouldn't tell us what they meant. He said, as long as we swore in a foreign language and didn't know what we were saying, it didn't count as swearing.

Class got a lot more interesting after that. We would talk to each other before class, calling each other Sesselbahn Hahn or Ziegeaffe. One favorite was Tulpenhai-Rülpser. But once, Fritz called Marta a Kranglas Kürbis and she decked him really hard. He got a bloody nose and had to go to the nurse.

Frau Werner never said anything although sometimes I thought I saw her smirk. Jerome said it was because she only knew book-German, not street-German. He said she was just a prägnanter unsichtbarer Pinguin. We thought that was maybe a little harsh.

My friend Jenny took Latin. I told her it was a dead language. She said I didn't know what I was talking about. I called her a Pommes Frites Eis am Stiel. She just rolled her eyes and went back to translating the Vulgate.

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