This exchange appeared in the 15 June 2005 installment of “Ask Leslie,” an advice column written by librarian Leslie Potter for the Hays Daily News in northwest Kansas.
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Q: I hope you can help me with a problem I have with my godson. Last summer he visited me for two weeks and plans to return in July. When cleaning out the room he stays in, I found an unfinished correspondence to a chum of his in his hometown. In it he says he [is] going to our local pool to “scout out some camel toads.” (I believe that’s what it said, he had spilled iced tea all over the desk when writing it, and it damaged a lot of papers.) I’m concerned he is doing drugs.
I tried to look for camel toads in a drug book, and I didn’t find them, but I found references to some type of frog or toad that people in another country lick to hallucinate. I don’t want to approach him on this until I have more information.
He is a good boy in middle school whose parents do not even drink. Please let me know what camel toads are and how I might be able to tell if he is smoking, taking, or licking them.
Perhaps I should have talked to his parents, but I don’t want to jump the gun. Is this something the local authorities need to be alerted to in order to protect other patrons at the pool or surrounding area? A concerned and uninformed reader
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A: The spilled iced tea did a number on the toads, so my younger, hipper coworkers tell me. What he undoubtedly wrote was “camel toes,” a crude euphemism for, well, too-tight pants worn by females.
The good news is that the expression has absolutely nothing to do with drugs. It has everything to do with why teenage boys go to the pool in the first place.
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