The Part Where Dinky Hooves Was Raised Better Than This
As all young colts and fillies know, lunch is the most important meal of the day. Breakfast goes by too fast and dinner always comes too early, but lunchtime—rain or shine, school day or weekend, inside at home or out on the playground—is perfect. For half an hour between history and math, anything is possible. Secrets are traded, friendships are strengthened, contracts are written in saliva and blood—and above all, absolutely no grownups can hear a word anypony says.
Even if that word, whispered between three fillies ensconced within the jungle gym, is one that none of them are supposed to know.
“Are you sure you heard it right?”
Mouth full as it was with mashed-up buttercups, Dinky Hooves found it harder than she expected to bend hers into a frown. Once she chewed a bit more and swallowed, she fixed Peachy Pie with a powerful stare, throwing in an eyeroll and a sigh just to drive the point home.
“I was right there,” she told her. “And they said it twice.”
Beaten back for the moment, Peachy Pie pursed her lips and hunched over her yogurt cup. A lull followed, buzzing with tension, until Sunny Daze leaned in to break it. “But… Fluttershy?” she asked. “Are you sure you didn’t just… I dunno…”
“She said it,” Dinky insisted. “And Rainbow Dash too. Both of them said they were… they said…”
Dinky threw a furtive glance towards the schoolhouse, matching Peachy and Sunny’s more anxious movements. Satisfied they were still alone, she wet her lips and scooted forward a bit, until her head hovered inches from the tips of her friends’ muzzles. She let the moment play out, silent and terrible, and then…
“Peeved.”
The word cut through the three fillies like scissors through silk, like hoofsteps outside their bedrooms when they were supposed to be asleep. Peachy shuddered as Sunny bit her lip, and an electric thrill rippled through Dinky’s shoulders, tickling her spine and tingling inside her chest.
She’d tapped into something bigger than herself, some secret power none of them could comprehend. It sounded so simple: just a few letters, some probably repeated, all mashed together into one whispered syllable. But here beneath the jungle gym, it was anything but. It was a grownup word—a bad word—and Dinky Hooves was the only one who knew it.
“I don’t get it.”
As Peachy’s eyes widened and Dinky’s narrowed into slits, Sunny Daze squirmed in place. “I mean… why aren’t we supposed to say it?” she went on, fiddling with an emptied string cheese wrapper in her lap. “It’s just a word, right?”
“It’s not just a word!” Dinky replied, with all the haughty confidence of a foal who’d rather enjoyed not feeling like one for a moment. “Millie didn’t want me to hear it. She wouldn’t even tell me what it means!”
“What does it mean?”
Peachy swiveled her uneasy gaze Dinky’s way, ready as Sunny was to hear her response. Too late, Dinky realized her mistake. “It… um…” She chewed on her tongue in thought. Why had Fluttershy said that word? What in Equestria would justify an action so patently adult?
“... angry,” Dinky semi-educatedly guessed. “It means you’re, uh… really, really mad.”
Like a pendulum on a string, Peachy’s head swung back towards Sunny. “Why wouldn’t they just say they were mad, then?” Sunny asked, her nose wrinkled with unsated skepticism.
“Because they’re grownups.” Dinky didn’t hesitate this time, her lungs refilled with newfound confidence. “That’s who grownup words are for.”
“That seems kind of silly,” Sunny said.
“Well, so do grownups half the time,” Dinky argued back. With a knowing shrug, Sunny conceded the point. “And that’s not the important thing anyway. The important thing is that we’re not supposed to say it.”
“But you said it,” Peachy meekly pointed out.
“That’s different!” Dinky paused to take a sip of grape juice, her hoof angled to hide the blush dawning over her cheeks. “Just because we’re not supposed to say it doesn’t mean we can’t. You don’t have to be a grownup to act like one.”
“How is saying a bad word acting like a grownup?” Sunny folded her forelegs over her chest, the seedlings of a pout sprouting around her eyes and mouth. “It doesn’t sound like a grownup word.”
“Why would it?” Dinky said, following the time-honored foalish practice of speaking first and figuring out later why what she’d said made sense. “Because… because grownups are boring, and it’s a boring-sounding word. It’s obvious.”
Sunny huffed and leaned back against the jungle gym’s frame, but offered no argument to counter Dinky’s claim. Another quiet moment came and went, reversing its previous course back over to Peachy.
“I always thought it was an animal,” she mumbled, only to shrink back once she noticed the looks her statement earned her. “‘Cause, uh… I-I heard my mom talk about having pet peeves once and I thought… y’know, pets? Like…”
Dinky’s eyebrow shot up, and Peachy cowered beneath it. “I don’t know, I never asked what it meant!” she wailed. “I just… wait, what are you doing?”
Sunny had hijacked Peachy’s train of thought, throwing papers and pencils everywhere as she dug through her saddlebag next to her lunchbox. After a few seconds, she freed a dog-eared book with a red cover from somewhere near the bottom, as thick around as her hoof and filled with thin pages that rustled like fallen leaves when she flipped through them.
“How do you spell it?” she asked without looking up. When neither Dinky nor Peachy came up with a reply, she grit her teeth and shot the former a disarmingly plaintive glare. “How do you spell the stupid grownup word?”
Dinky swallowed hard, her teeth already hovering around her tongue. “Well… it starts with ‘p’. Then ‘e’... and another ‘e’. And… I guess another ‘e’. And then, um… ‘f’?”
“Here!”
With Dinky and Peachy peering over her shoulders, Sunny bent down close and scanned one page with particular focus, moving her hoof down as she read and then stabbing it towards a line near the bottom.
“‘Peeve. Vulgar verb’,”, she read. “‘To annoy or irritate somepony. Derived from peevish’, which means…” She shifted her hoof another inch. “‘Easily irritated, especially by unimportant things’.”
Sunny sat back from the dictionary and looked up at Dinky, a move which the more grownup of the two chose to take in stride. “See?” Dinky said with a tentative smirk. “Told you it meant ‘mad’.”
“Technically, it means you’re annoyed,” Sunny grumbled, though even she didn’t sound convinced of her position. Peachy, meanwhile, looked more perplexed than ever.
“Wait, so…” she said. “If it means the same as ‘annoyed’, then does that mean we can’t say that either?”
“I don’t think so,” Dinky replied. “‘Annoyed’ isn’t, um…” She craned her neck over Sunny’s head again. “... vulgar.”
“So what can we say?” Peachy asked. Both she and Dinky looked at Sunny, who wasted a moment sighing and acting dramatic before flipping through to the back pages of her book.
“Synonyms: irritate, annoy…”
“Those are both fine,” Dinky assured both her friends. “The dictionary already said those.”
“... irk, gall…”
“Yeeeeah…” Dinky said, less assured this time. “Keep going?”
“Pique…”
“Probably okay.”
“Exasperate…”
“Definitely grownup.”
“Vex…”
“That just sounds scary,” said Peachy.
“Like a robot word or something,” Dinky agreed.
“Nettle…”
“Isn’t that a plant?”
Sunny looked ready to say otherwise, but the lunch bell robbed her of her chance. Their discussion thus tabled, the three fillies gathered up their trash and made their way back towards the schoolhouse together. As they filed into line with their classmates outside the front door, Peachy sidled up next to Dinky to whisper in her ear.
“I had no idea grownup words were so complicated…”
“Yeah,” Dinky mouthed back. “No kidding.”
“It’s still a dumb word,” Sunny muttered up ahead of them.
“You’re a dumb word,” Dinky shot back as the line began to move. “Geez, Sunny, sometimes you can be such a killjoy.”
With no warning whatsoever, the world around Dinky went mad. A collective gasp rippled through her entire class, followed by a deathly silence punctuated by gobsmacked grimaces and gaping stares. Peachy’s hoof shot up over her mouth, and Sunny recoiled as if she’d been slapped, tears filling her sightless, shimmering eyes.
Dinky looked from her to Peachy and back again, then at every one of her classmates in turn and finally at Sunny again just to make sure this was really happening. By all evidence she could see, it was..
“... what?”
Instead of answering her, nopony said a word or—seemingly—even breathed. In the lack of chaos that followed, Miss Cheerilee entered the conversation like a thunderstorm. “Dinky Doo!” she barked from the head of the line. “That is a very inappropriate thing to say!”
Sandwiched between her classmates’ collective horror and her teacher’s unbridled wrath, Dinky could think of no other course of action but to blink a few times and wonder whether she’d hit her head ducking out from under the jungle gym. “It is?”
Miss Cheerilee elected not to answer that question, and instead yanked Dinky out of line so she could shepherd her forcefully back towards the door. “I am sure you didn’t learn that kind of language at home, young lady!” she hissed once they were outside. “For goodness sakes, don’t you know better than to call another pony something like… something like that?”
Dinky blinked again. “I…”
“Well? I’m waiting, missy!”
“It…” Dinky mumbled, each word taking ages to piece together. “It just means she’s being a spoilsport… like, acting kinda lame and being all…” She shook her head, then shook it again twice as hard. “Okay, wait a minute…”
But Miss Cheerilee wouldn’t wait, even for a second. “You stay right there,” she ordered, pushing down on Dinky’s shoulder until her rump landed hard on the schoolhouse’s front stoop. “We’ll see what your parents have to say about their daughter’s behavior.”
“But…” Dinky sputtered after her as she turned to storm back inside. “You… wha…”
The schoolhouse door slammed shut before she could get a full word out, leaving her with only a blank wall to shout her single coherent thought at.
“How is that a bad word?”
If anypony heard her, they didn’t say so. Alone and confused, Dinky slumped onto the stoop and put her head between her forehooves, doing her best to rub some sense into her skull. She didn’t know what just happened or why, but there was one thing she certainly did know now.
Grownup words were not to be trifled with.
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Awesome as always mate.
I'm so [censored] that I didn't think of this first
This was entertaining.
Am I the only one here who felt like they all nearly orgasmed from hearing it?
Words are serious business.
This story just made me crack up. Seriously, how is Peeved a bad word in Pony Culture? (Might be their version of "Pissed") In any case, I think up a thousand other words that would be worse. Not typing them here, though.
Fucking little shits damn saying cocksucking grownup words and shit like little bastards and bitches. Mother fucking kids these days, I swear to fuck...
I have the distinct impression that she pronounced it "pa-kyew."
In any case, most entertaining. Reminds me of when I said a character in a story seemed pissed off when I was in second grade. It seemed like a perfectly legitimate synonym to me. Thank you for this. (Also, nice dodge on who precisely Dinky's parents are. Poor girl has almost as much parental ambiguity as Scootaloo.)
7280866
Dinky Doo: the Anti-Scootaloo.
7280892
"Could I borrow a mom for a while? You've got, like, five."
Kek. This story is the bo-- whoops! Cant say that word here! Kids might be reading!
7280698
s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/0d/2f/4e/0d2f4e61946498bf2c954b431fb70a34.jpg
only in a land inhabited by technicolor ponies would "peeved" be considered a bad word.
This was beautiful. Too bad there was one killjoy who downvoted it.
7280907 ooooh get rekt
I see what you did there
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I don't believe you until you tell me which class you main.
7280622 OMFG
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I get turned on by dirty talking stallions or mares, too.
7281358 I Always play tanks.
Titan Defender is how i swing.
Really, that Destiny reference was kind of obvious. How did nobody else catch it?
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Nightstalker Hunter master race.
And probably because it's just us addicts left now.
I like the vex option, but you probably have to be a certainly level of fancy before you can be vexed. So, probably just Rarity. Maybe Sweetie, too.
How are *beep* and *beep* bad words?
...Wait.
I am so *beep* at my cousins. You're such a *beep*.
The fuck?!
...What.
So I can say fuck, but I can't say *beep*? Oh damn you, you shitty bitch word.
I'm so *beep* right now.
...Oh come on!
I'm so fuckin *beep* right now at those two asshole words that I can't say for some reason.
Well that was funny as [censored]. Nice job!
Gee Miss Cheerilee, there's no reason to be such a cotton headed ninny muggins...
7281699 Huh, the censor ship must be in port for repairs.
cdn.makeagif.com/media/7-17-2015/zZFMxX.gif
7281699 sorry mate.
7282255 good one
.
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i.imgur.com/P9guOLo.jpg
7282428 Thank you, but I may only, in good conscience, take credit for the part about it being in for repairs. I read of the ship itself in one of Piers Anthony's Xanth books.
This is amazing, funny, and adorable!
That was (Buy some apples!) funny
This was funny.
This was certainly an amusing and creative little story....now I demand MOAR!!
I mean c'mon, you can't just expect me to be content after having our protagonist get in trouble for using the word "Killjoy" now can you?! T_T
7280698 Bruh. Could ya tone down the language? I'm, like, so peeved right now.
Killjoy was probably a bad word because it had the word kill in it and MLP is a children's show
That Terrible Sinking Feeling When You Realise Fluttershy Is The Only Person In MLP Who Swears
*cheerilee is hit with a tranq dart by deadpool well pip runs over to dinky* quick pip get her to the tardis.
How is peeved a bad word?!
This is a very good one-shot.
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I imagine a follow up with something like this:
"Dinky! How could you! We raised you better than this, young lady."
"Yeah, your mother is extremely disappointed in you. Now, Mrs Cheerilee, what exactly did she say?"
*whispers*
"Is that all? Well that's not so bad. I call ponies that all the time."
"Are you bucking kidding me..."
*collective gasps*
7282981 just lol
7280645 Yeah, but questions are generally more interesting than answers.
7280695
Same here.
7281514 I understood and I barely play these days!
In real life is peved a bad word?
Plus
we've head ponys say What the Buck before and no one cared
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7283591 i think they were using it as a place holder for "pissed"
7282981 Oh wow that would be AMAZING!!! <3
7283615 Right. In real life peeved is not an expletive, and in fact it refers to a much less aggravated state of mind than "pissed". It was something of a parental bonus, to use the trope.
Could be worse, father couldve lost his job and Miss Cheerilee heard about his recipt.