Ava’s father’s rule against certain words

Ava’s father’s rule against certain words is a family language code that makes word choice carry emotional and personal weight. Its best-known example is his refusal to let Ava say hate: he substitutes immensely dislike, setting a high threshold for the word and tying that correction to his own history. The rule is not simply a vocabulary list; as Ava’s feelings about Kelly Waititi show, its language becomes a measure of what she believes she has finally experienced.

The rule and its origin

Ava recalls that, as a child, she was never allowed to say she hated anything. If she said she hated broccoli, her father corrected her: she immensely disliked it. The example makes the rule concrete as a repeated domestic exchange, not an abstract principle. A child’s ordinary dislike is redirected into a more elaborate phrase, while hate is reserved for something with a far greater emotional force.

Ava explains that distinction through her parents’ relationship. Her father had hated her mother, and Ava describes that feeling as rage, intensity, and vile anger capable of blacking out everything good and real and even eliminating a person’s sense of self. He had known what hate felt like; broccoli, by comparison, could not qualify. Ava adds that he has moved on and no longer hates her mother in the same way. The recollection therefore gives the rule a personal history without presenting it as a general theory: its measure comes from what he himself endured.

When Ava uses the forbidden word

The rule’s force becomes clearest when Ava applies its central distinction to her own grief. After saying that she has never really hated anything, she marks an exception: she hates what Kelly Waititi did and hates that Kelly left her on her own. The repeated declaration places Ava’s experience beside her father’s past standard, but it does not make the two situations identical. Instead, the old correction gives the new feeling a sharpened edge: this is no longer a child’s exaggerated complaint about food, but a painful judgment about being left behind.

That moment also shows the limit of a rule that can control a word but not settle the feeling beneath it. Ava does not soften her judgment into immensely dislike. She uses hate twice, attaching it both to what happened and to the loneliness that followed. The distinction her father taught her thus remains present even when she crosses its boundary: because the word has been withheld from ordinary frustrations, its use signals that Ava considers this hurt exceptional.

The rule in Ava’s letter

A later letter to Gideon turns the childhood rule into a comic, practical inventory. Ava opens by teasing him for calling her cool, then worries that calling him an idiot so early in her reply may violate letter etiquette. She apologizes and observes that, if her father had heard her say it in real life, she would have been grounded. The contrast between the written exchange and the imagined consequence at home shows that the rules are part of Ava’s everyday awareness, even when she is joking with a friend.

Because Gideon likes lists, Ava offers one titled Ways to piss off Ava’s dad: a list. She admits that it consists mostly of words he immensely dislikes, and the list broadens the rule beyond hate: idiot, stupid, and wog also appear. The apology for idiot is folded into the joke, so Ava can both playfully break the rule in her letter and show that she knows its terms. Her father’s objections are not all explained in the same way. Ava connects his dislike of wog to the family’s Greek background, adding that she is Greek too by inheritance. In this instance, a forbidden word touches identity as well as manners.

Language, feeling, and family

The rule links small acts of speech to a larger family history. Its first example distinguishes dislike from the anger Ava associates with her father’s marriage; its later appearances show that he also sets limits on insults and other unacceptable words. The letter’s list makes those limits easy to tease, but the childhood correction and the imagined grounding give them real consequence within Ava’s account.

The rule also provides a telling contrast between inherited language and Ava’s present experience. Her father’s standard taught her not to use hate lightly; when she finally uses it about Kelly Waititi, she names a hurt that she cannot reduce to an ordinary dislike. The word has not resolved her anger or her loneliness. Rather, the history of being told not to say it makes her decision to say it a meaningful departure from the speech she learned at home.