San Francisco Blog

Some 'school bullies' have allegedly found a novel use for an umbrella, too

When I was in school, we had the boy who left a deposit in the broom closet. We had the boy who kissed other boys because he saw Bugs Bunny do it. We had the boys who ate boogers, paste, and other kids' lunches. We didn't have the boy who tried to open an umbrella up another boy's ass.

That was the gist of a brief, but eye-catching, story in today's Chronicle. Oddly, however, the Chron refers, repeatedly to "bullies" and "bullying" in the instance of two larger boys who are charged with twice ganging up on a San Francisco middle schooler and shoving an umbrella into his clothed rectum. Lawyer Roger Reynolds tells SF Weekly he doesn't recall using the terms "bully" or "bullying" in the lawsuit he filed against the San Francisco Unified School District and others this month -- he feels terms like "assault" and "battery" are more apropos.

If the two older boys had tossed the alleged victim into a cauldron and eaten the flesh off of his limbs, would that have been "bullying"? Sounds more like cannibalism. We're not sure what shoving an umbrella up someone's ass is -- we're not the NYPD -- but just because it happened at school doesn't make it "bullying" -- unless you consider Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris the worst school bullies of all-time.

The dictionary definition of "bullying" is merely "to treat abusively" -- a vague explanation that could encompass nearly anything. There is no American equivalent to L'Académie française -- if there were, they'd likely be tied up in 24-hour legislative sessions dealing with text messaging grammar -- so I'll open it up to our readership. Can you come up with a term for horrific bullying that goes above and beyond the realm of pigtails in inkwells, putting dogshit in someone's bag, or the old standby of smacking people around?