“The Dictionary Thing” — An Antiquated Fetish Marker?

As a young child, I would wait until I was alone so that I could sneak the dictionary off the shelf and slip away into a private space to look up words that made my heart race. Some of those words were: spanking, punishment, discipline, and all of the relevant synonyms.

I didn’t quite understand why, but I understood that it wasn’t ‘normal’ and I felt a lot of panic around it. The same type of panic I felt during the episode of I Love Lucy when Ricky took Lucy over his knee, or the spanking clock in Pinocchio. Spanking excited me in a way I didn’t understand until I was older. And I spent years feeling guilty and ashamed of that excitement.

It wasn’t until I joined FetLife that I learned ‘the dictionary thing’ is common among fetishists. The first time I saw it mentioned on someone else’s profile, I felt instant relief that I wasn’t alone in this. The behavior is apparently not exclusive to spanking fetishists, either. For example, those with a balloon popping fetish may have looked up words such as: popping, bursting.

The dictionary thing is probably an artifact of times when the internet wasn’t as easily accessible. Nowadays, google is at our fingertips and hopefully young fetishists won’t have to wait two whole decades to learn they’re not the strangest human on the planet, and that there’s a whole bunch of folks out there that can relate to them.

So, if you did the dictionary thing, you’re not alone.