A Fly in My Crème Brulée

Author: Katie Hylas

Everything I ever hear about Middlebury is positive (unless it's about the weather). If you go to Middlebury you are expected to LOVE it. "Oh it's such a beautiful school, such a great school, oh and you can ski whenever you want!" With all this positive propaganda, I lose track of reality sometimes.

The College is unique - it is truly in the middle of nowhere and therefore the pulses that drive the rest of America get perverted and contorted once inside our little world. The truth is, funny little bugs sneak their way here and need to be discussed. But mostly laughed at.

"Yo dude! We're totally gunna slay some b****es tonight!" The first time I heard this passionate declaration resounding off and through Battell's dangerously thin walls I was struck with fear. I thought, "slay?" Am I in danger? Should I lock myself in my room? Should I call Public Safety? Then it occurred to me that the aspiring murderer was one of the nicest boys on my floor. I concluded that he must not actually want to slay, but rather, to lay. Welcome to the realities of sex at Middlebury College.

As the school year starts up and our strapping young Midd men and beautiful young Midd women go out in search of each other, I expect to hear Middlebury's newest (and most disturbing) new sex euphemism "slay" thrown around a lot. Our animalistic past has ensured a loose historic association between sex and violence but recently the trend has become popular in collegiate circles. I'm told that at the University of Michigan, the word of choice is "punish." To use it in a sentence, "Hey, go punish that girl over there!" While at the University of Richmond the more moderate, "bone" is employed.

"Slay," although floating around other college campuses seems to be something that's really exploding at Middlebury. Come on, do we really have to resort to murderous language? Isn't our society past barbarism? "Hey can I sleep on your floor my roommate 'sexiled' me" could soon become, "Yeah man, my roommate's dismembering some [expletive] with an axe and burying her bits under the floorboards. Can I crash on your beanbag?"

The term "slay" creates a strange picture of male and female relations. I think there has been some confusion. Back when we were hunters and gatherers, men used to go out together and slay wild beasts. It was how they bonded. But when did the wild beasts become wild women? Women aren't creatures to be hunted and killed, and men aren't barbarians looking to kill them.

Can't we be a little bit more modern? Do we have to resort to gruesome slang? Middlebury is a friendly and safe environment; does anybody worry about what the use of such language says about us Midd kids or about our generation? Come on, seriously. Or maybe we should just laugh.

Still, "slay" leaves me scratching my head. First of all, there are certainly much more comical (and less violent) options for those of us too bashful to use the S(ex) word. Richard and Kitty's World of Sex Euphemisms offers some other titillating options… perhaps the next popular euphemisms will be Zallywhacking, Zoinkering and Ziggy-wiggling - but I doubt it.

For me at least, until "I slayed her" becomes the mutual "we sleighed (over the river and through the woods)" I'm going to avoid the swords.