In the bright and polished city of Veritopia, nestled under skies so clean they almost sparkled, lived a boy named Nilo. Veritopia was famous for many things — its glimmering glass towers, its perfectly synchronized transport system, its never-wilted gardens — but above all, it was famous for its language.
In Veritopia, there were no dirty words.
Not just banned — nonexistent.
No swear words, no slurs, no insults, no vulgarity. The people spoke in crisp, respectful tones, with every sentence polished like a gemstone. The Language Council, a supreme body that presided over every published word, ensured the lexicon remained squeaky clean. Even jokes were filtered. Even whispers.
Children grew up with "O dear!" instead of “Damn!” and “Fizzlesticks!” in place of anything worse. Veritopians were proud of their vocabulary and how it sparkled like their sidewalks. “A refined tongue reflects a refined soul,” their anthem boasted.
Nilo, curious and awkward, was twelve years old and entirely unsatisfied.
"Why do we need to speak like we’re walking dictionaries all the time?" he once asked his mother, a language therapist. Her eyes had widened like saucers.
“Nilo!” she whispered urgently. “Don’t say such things. The neighbors might hear. And then what?”
He didn’t know what would happen exactly, but the tension in the air was real. You could be reported for "verbal dissonance" and sent to the Council for “Adjustment Therapy.” Nilo had seen it happen to his friend Marnie when she called her teacher “ridiculously old-fashioned.” She came back quieter. Always smiling. Too much smiling.
But the thing about forbidden fruit — even the hypothetical kind — is that it grows in the shadows of curiosity. And Nilo’s curiosity bloomed like a weed.
One day, while exploring his grandfather’s dusty attic, Nilo found a peculiar book hidden inside an old box labeled “Unsorted: Pre-Refinement Era.” Its cover was cracked, and inside were words unlike any he had ever seen. Coarse words. Angry words. Sharp words. Dirty words.
At first, he was scandalized. He almost dropped the book in horror. But then, slowly, he read.
He read pages where characters cursed when they were hurt. Where lovers whispered words full of heat, not polish. Where villains spat vile insults. It was raw. It was real. It was... human.
He read every page. Twice.
By the end, Nilo wasn’t afraid anymore. He was fascinated.
And he had questions.
“Grandpa,” he asked later that night, “Why don’t people use these kinds of words anymore?”
His grandfather paused. Slowly, he closed the book he was reading and looked at Nilo. His eyes — a bit misty, a bit mischievous — twinkled.
“Because, my boy, once upon a time, words hurt too much. People fought wars over insults. Kids were bullied until they broke. Hatred grew from careless tongues. So the Council decided — clean speech, clean society.”
“But isn’t that fake?” Nilo asked. “What if people still feel those things? Doesn’t hiding the words just hide the truth?”
Grandpa chuckled. “Now that’s a dangerous question.”
---
The next day, Nilo experimented.
He stubbed his toe on a chair and whispered one of the words from the book. Not too loudly. But the power of it — the way it burst from him, unrefined and wild — felt like lightning in his blood. It didn’t clean up the pain. But it made it real.
Over the week, he tried more.
He muttered mutinies under his breath at the robotic school counselor who always spoke in pre-programmed “positive phrases.”
He rolled an insult off his tongue in his head while watching the class bully steal another kid’s lunch and get away with it, again.
He didn’t say the words aloud. Not yet.
But he started feeling different. Braver. Sharper.
And lonelier.
Because everyone else still smiled too hard and spoke too gently, even when it was clear they didn’t mean it. Their eyes didn’t match their mouths. Their feelings were hidden beneath flowery sentences and pristine grammar.
So Nilo did the unthinkable.
He stood in the middle of his classroom one morning, took a deep breath, and said, “This is all bullshit!”
Gasps exploded like fireworks.
The air turned electric. A thousand eyes stared. The classroom assistant froze, her hand mid-air. The principal was called.
---
Nilo was taken to the Council for Adjustment.
Inside a room that smelled too clean, he sat across a round table. Twelve officials in white robes surrounded him. They had screens floating above their heads displaying his school reports, biometric responses, and worst of all — his vocabulary usage trend.
“Nilo,” one of them began, smiling far too politely, “You seem distressed. Using profanity is often a symptom of emotional misalignment. Let’s talk.”
“I am distressed,” Nilo said. “Because none of you let people say what they mean. You only let them say what sounds good.”
A pause.
Another official leaned in. “Words create emotion, young man. Harmful words create harmful emotions. We eliminate those to eliminate pain.”
“But people still feel pain,” Nilo argued. “They just don’t say it. So they smile while hurting. They pretend. Isn’t that worse?”
Silence.
One Councilor, older than the others, spoke softly. “We created this system so children like you wouldn’t grow up with hate in your ears.”
“But you made it so we never hear the truth either,” Nilo replied.
---
The Council did not send him to Therapy.
Instead, something strange happened.
Within a week, the conversation spread. Nilo became a whisper in classrooms, then a name on forums, then a topic on sanitized news channels. “The Boy Who Spoke Dirty.”
Except, he hadn’t been dirty.
He had been honest.
Soon, students began asking, “Can we express anger better?” and “Can sadness have sharp edges?” and “Can real feelings sound ugly and still be okay?”
Within months, the Council held its first public hearing on “Lexical Expansion Reform.”
Nilo, still twelve but suddenly very important, stood again before the Council.
This time, they asked him to speak.
He took a deep breath and said:
“Sometimes we need to scream. Sometimes we need to curse at the world, at unfairness, at pain. Not because we’re bad, but because we’re human. Dirty words aren’t dirty if they come from truth.”
---
And so, Veritopia changed.
They didn’t become cruel. They didn’t let hate flourish. But they allowed feeling its full vocabulary.
Children were taught emotional honesty — not just manners.
Books were printed with edges and flaws.
People began to say what they meant — even if it stung — and because of that, they began to understand each other more.
The language didn’t lose its beauty.
It gained its soul.
And Nilo?
He didn’t speak dirty all the time.
Only when it mattered.
Because in a world where everything was always clean, sometimes a little mess was the only way to truly live.
