Today's urban slang for eavesdropping is earjacking. It sounds so threatening. "Tell me your life story, or you'll never see your family again!" Every three seconds someone is earjacked. National statistics reported the number of earjackings this year was 75,048,000. This included all types of earjacking, from cell phones, scanners and CB radios, to simple baby monitors.

Most everyone is familiar with this scene: A woman walks through a department store. Suddenly, her cell phone sings, "My milkshake brings the boys to the yard, and they're like 'It's better than yours"' …

"Hey! What's up? I'm shopping." The woman is completely unaware she is being earjacked. "I told her the only sorority I would not join would be Phi Kappa Delta."

The disturbed earjacker glares at the woman on her cell phone as if to say, her best friend belongs to that sorority.

The woman de-escalates the situation by saying, "Um … but I have another friend who really, really likes Phi Kappa Delta."

For me, eavesdropping dates all the way back to 1965. I learned to earjack from the best — my mother. She didn't need an audiologic evaluation to prove she had a frequency range of a dog. "You're not going to a party with boys!" she yelled from the kitchen. I was upstairs talking on the phone in my bedroom closet with the door shut.

In those days, it was not unusual to hear crosstalk while you were talking on the phone (when telephone lines cross). "Sshhhh. Someone's on the line," I would say to my friend.

The right thing to do would have been to hang up the phone. Sometimes I did — when the topic of conversations revolved around recipes, the price of beef and little Timmy getting an A on his spelling quiz. But most times, I stayed on the phone and listened to the audio-theater.

I pictured two women with pink sponge rollers knotted in their hair and wearing housecoats. They sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes while they gossiped about their friend Jane cheating at bridge.

It's not as if my mother ever said to me, "Hang up that phone! It's wrong to eavesdrop." She would say, "Give me the phone. And bring me my cigarettes." Of course eavesdropping had its risks. "The nerve of those women, saying the chicken casserole dish I made for the Ladies Altar Society luncheon made everyone sick."

A person doesn't need high-tech devices to earjack — one good ear will do, or in some cases, a Miracle Ear. Recently, I was having dinner with my husband at an outdoor cafe. Across from our table sat a man and his parents. How do I know they were his parents and not a couple he picked up from an assisted living facility? He was practically sitting on my lap.

Chet was visiting from Palm Springs, Fla. He suggested his parents order mahi mahi. Chet had a wife named Ashley and a daughter named Lynly. "Ashley's an aggressive driver," Chet complained to his parents. "I refuse to get in the same car with her."

Apparently, Chet's daughter, Lynly had her mother's aggressive-driving gene because Chet told his folks that he refused to get in a car with her, too. What a backseat driver, I thought. If you ask me, Ashley and Lynly should strap him to the roof of their car and drive him through the backside of the Sierras.

In defense of earjackers, it's not as if our ears have an on/off switch — like a baby monitor. Speaking of which, when our youngest daughter was born, she would wake in the middle of the night as most infants do. One particular night, I sat rocking my little girl back to sleep. From the baby's monitor I heard the neighbor couple talking. Apparently, they couldn't sleep either.

I had every intention to get up from the rocker, walk over to the monitor and turn it off. But my little one stirred in my arms. And any mother knows you never wake a sleeping baby.

To find out more about Mimi Kopulos and read her past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.