So I was discussing the Emmy results with Kathleen while Caroline contentedly played with her new plush unicorns she’d gotten at the Renfaire yesterday. And, commenting on the fact that Stephen Colbert got beaten for best performance in a variety show by Tony Bennett, I said, “Twice in a year he got beat out by a singer in a one-shot special. Son of a–” And then I caught myself in deference to our four year old’s presence.
And apparently thinking that I had simply suffered a memory lapse, Caroline piped up, “Bìŧçh.”
I said, “Aw no.”
Given all the incentive she needed, Caroline cheerfully said, “Son of a bìŧçh. Son of a bìŧçh.”
Kathleen said, “Caroline, those are grown-up words. Don’t say that.”
“Don’t say that?” she said.
“No,” I reinforced. “Don’t say that.”
“Ðámņ it,” she muttered and went back to her toys. “Dammit dammit dammit.”
Oh yeah. That Father of the Year award’s looking pretty shakey.
PAD
• 
Don’t worry about it, PAD. I was driving in Hartford traffic once when my oldest son was about 4, and some jerk was weaving in and out of traffic. I said, “Look at that šhìŧhëád”, to no one in particular, forgetting he was in the back seat, and he started looking around and said, “Who’s a šhìŧhëád, daddy?” Broke me of the habit of using foul language in front of the kids from that day forward. He’s 25 now and still does not use “adult” language (at least, not in front of me.)
Doug
My 7 year old has known for years what is an adult word and what is a word she is allowed to say. She comes and tells me when her classmates say something she is not allowed to say. She wont spell it or say it. Just tell me what it starts with and looks embarassed.
Sadly I am the Lenny Bruce of dads, so she is able to identify all of George Carlins words plus a few inventions of my own.
Peter –
My niece recently had this conversation with her mother, which I can reproduce thanks to the power of data being stored forever once it’s online…
Niece’s Mother (to her Husband): My new theory is that Karl Rove quit so he could follow Van Halen on their new tour.
THE H: Yeah. That makes more sense than ‘spending time with his family,’ given what he’s like.
THE M: He’s going to be a Halen-Head.
THE NIECE: Mommy, that’s a little bit bìŧçhÿ.
THE M: Yeah, you’re right [note: contextually, she was]. Probably shouldn’t say that at preschool, though. Not really something little kids say in public.
THE NIECE: What, bìŧçhÿ? Can I say it at home?
THE M: I don’t care.
THE NIECE: Okay. Thanks, Mommy.
Now, I recognize that’s not necessarily the best method… but it sure is dámņëd adorable! 😉
I was the one who cured my father of using “adult words” around us.
We were with my mother’s brothers and sisters one day for some event, and someone said “Shut up.” Back then that was one of the expressions we were taught not to say (Boy have times changed). I stood in the middle of everyone and announced that “That’s a bad word and you shouldn’t say it.” Being 3 o 4 they found it cute and started laughing at me. Needless to say, I looked at them and very politly said, “Ðámņ it, it’s not funny.”
From then on my father spent my childhood whenever something happened exclaiming, “God…bless America.”
Thank you for these tales, people! 😀
Yeah, she’s yours, all right. 🙂
LOL!
Remember, from now on substitute any ‘grown-up word’ with ‘Grozit’; that should leave onlookers guessing 🙂
If it makes you feel any better, Pete, my mother used to make a conscious effort to teach the word “šhìŧ” to any child under 5 that she was to watch for an extended period of time–merely because it made her giggle.
I now suspect this as an ulterior motive for why she is constantly encouraging me and my wife to have children…
Many years ago, I was about to make a right turn into a parking lot, only to get cut off by someone in the left turn lane who was obviously in a far greater hurry than I. I managed to slam on the brakes and for emphasis I added “Je-sus Christ!”
And from the back of the car, my adorable daughter smiled, snug in her car seat, and replied “Jezus Chrise!”
We’ve heard Katherine use “dammit” once or twice and have tried to gently break her of the habit. It’s tough, though — both Lisa and I have tended to be free with our language, so it’s a hard habit to break completely.
Believe me, though — I can think of things Caroline would have come up with that would’ve made that Father of the Year award a lot MORE shaky. 🙂
And I adore MarvelFan’s suggestion. I may have to use it myself.
TWL
My daughter, Molly, is non-verbal and all the kids in her class use sign language. One day her teacher left the room for a few minutes and came back to find Molly teaching the other kids how to give each other the finger. The teacher calmly explained that this was a bad sign and they shouldn’t use it. When I told my son about this incident he said, “Molly’s been riding in the car with Dad, hasn’t she?”
Even curing yourself of swearing in front of them doesn’t help.
When my son (now aged 11) was about two and a half, I caught myself about to say “šhìŧ!” over something and changed it at the last moment to “rats!”
When I’d exclaimed that, I thought – Oh, not too bad, and at least if he repeats it, it’s not a problem.
Famous last words, eh?
I come home from work about three days later and while not quite greeting me at the door with a meat cleaver, while saying “Talk To Your Son”, my then-wife didn’t look happy. In the background I could hear our lad running around saying “rats!rats!rats!rats!rats!rats!rats!rats!rats!
rats!rats!rats!rats!rats!rats!rats!rats!rats!”
“I’ve. Had. That. For. Twelve. Hours…” she said, through gritted teeth.
… I couldnt help but picture her with the voice of Robin Williams when he played his son saying “fûçk” at the end of “Live in the Met”.
And I laughed again.
My kids (5 and 7) are allowed to swear at home, as long as they don’t use the curse words as insults directed at anyone. And as long as they don’t use them in the presence of others than the close family. It’s kind of a “contract” between us and it works pretty well so far – them not being forbidden to use the language but taking responsibility for where and when they use it.
Furthermore, I’m of the opinion that cuss words are not a sign of poor language, as is the popular judgment. Actually, I think they enrichen one’s language just as any other words, as far as they are not overused or mis-used, which goes for all words.
A child who has a rich language in other ways won’t be destroyed just because he or she uses some cuss words. And I would definitely not worry about the daughter of a writer. 🙂
the 2 year old daughter of a friend managed to transpose an “adult word” into “oh carp!”
and it could be worse, folks. my 5 year old nephew was sent to the pricipal’s office one day last year for mooning his classmates in the lunch room.
which I have to admit, is a story which made me laugh my ummm -tushy off when I heard it.
the 2 year old daughter of a friend managed to transpose an “adult word” into “oh carp!”
and it could be worse, folks. my 5 year old nephew was sent to the pricipal’s office one day last year for mooning his classmates in the lunch room.
which I have to admit, is a story which made me laugh my ummm -tushy off when I heard it.
the 2 year old daughter of a friend managed to transpose an “adult word” into “oh carp!”
and it could be worse, folks. my 5 year old nephew was sent to the pricipal’s office one day last year for mooning his classmates in the lunch room.
which I have to admit, is a story which made me laugh my ummm -tushy off when I heard it.
the 2 year old daughter of a friend managed to transpose an “adult word” into “oh carp!”
and it could be worse, folks. my 5 year old nephew was sent to the pricipal’s office one day last year for mooning his classmates in the lunch room.
which I have to admit, is a story which made me laugh my ummm -tushy off when I heard it.
My sister, who is now 24, was born when I was 16. She had reached the toddler stage, and I was babysitting one day, reading a magazine. She decided it would be fun to take all of my scattered cassettes and stack them. She wasn’t able to stack them straight, and it wasn’t long before the tower collapsed, and I was taken from the magazine with the words “Jeziss Kwise!”
To this day, I maintain that those were her first words. I don’t know which of us she had learned it from though.
Oh yeah, i was raised with even “crap” and “darn” being strongly frowned on, although this seems to have helped me self-censor by simply substituting words I “know” are bad but that no one really worries about these days.
For instance, a few years ago I was halfway down a flight of stairs when I tripped. I could tell I was about to slam both knees into the tile floor very very hard. But I was at work, with students within possible hearing range of anything I might interject. Without even having to stumble or hesitate, my reflexive utterance was a very loud “CRAP!”
Personally, I’m not offended by even the saltiest of language, but you never know when you’re gonna run across a Freshman who led a very sheltered life to date and will have a stroke if they hear any of the words the FCC bans. 🙂 (In personal life, I’ve found that swearing is much more effective if used sparingly, so they know you’re frelling serious…I curse a blue streak while alone and driving, though.)
This may be a bit retro for some of you out here in PADLand, but what ever happended to Shazbot, Feldercarb, and Smeg?
(from Mork and Mindy, the original version of Battlestar Galactica, and Red Dwarf, respectively)
(*wipe tear here*) as a mother of 5, I can’t stop laughing. When my youngest was @ 4 or 5, we were watching the DVD of Lord of the Rings, and I warned her the monsters were coming up, and she might not want to watch this part. That’s when she piped up with “The Fongules?” (Nazguls). My Italian mother-in-law was less than pleased.
ROTFLMAO, Peter!
My story that is something like that….one day driving I got behind someone driving slowly. And of course I was in a hurry and couldn’t get around him. So we are stopped at the lights and it changes to green. Of course, he doesn’t move.
So I yell ‘Gas pedal, Grandpa!’, my then young son in the back seat says ‘Grandpa, where’s Grandpa. I want to see Grandpa’.
My position has long been that if the kid is older than about eight, he or she has heard most of the words, and from peers at that. My first-ever encounter with the F-word was in fourth grade, when I moved from the Primary wing of my elementary school to the Intermediate wing, and saw it scratched into the paint on one of the bathroom stalls in foot-high letters.
My parents rarely used anything stronger than “dámņ” or “hëll” around the house when my sisters and I were growing up. It was understood that we, the kids, were not to use even those TV-permitted words. Even now, in my forties, I think I’ve heard my mother say “šhìŧ” maybe twice. Dad’s language got more colorful in later years, but there were other factors at play there.
The problem I see today is that a lot of parents just don’t set any kind of language restrictions or make any effort to control their own use of certain words. If you’re in the habit of telling your four-year-old that you’ll “smack the šhìŧ out of him” if he doesn’t “fûçkìņg stop it,” don’t be surprised when you get a call from school in a year wanting to discuss his telling his teacher to “leave me the fûçk alone.”
Just about all the parents I have regular contact with tone their language down considerably for younger audiences, though.
I’m not sure if the story I’ve been told of my first word is true or not, but I find it amusing. My Mom’s favorite word was šhìŧ. She’d tell us constantly not to step in the dog šhìŧ in the yard. One day, I crouched down and pointed at it exclaiming over and over, “Dog šhìŧ Mommy, dog šhìŧ!” My older brother and sister were mortified that I’d say such a thing, Mom simply said, “that’s right, now don’t step in it”
My Dad when raising my sister and myself for a time kept a swear tally. Everytime he would say any particular undesirable “adult” words he would give us a quarter. After a couple months of this he sat my sister and I down and explained that words, even those words, were still only words and it matters how you use them to give them power. Although I do take that to heart and believe it of swear words to this day I’m sure that more than half of his motivation was how much money he was losing to the two of us at the time.
I tend to be one of those people who, when upon realizing that they uttered a swear word in front of a particularly young child, will utter another as emphasis for the mistake.
My godson managed to catch a good one.
While driving into a busy car park, we were pipped to the spot by someone who overtook, swerved around my friend, and nabbed the spot. In exasperation she said “bûggër!” and drove on.
Must have been a few weeks later when we were doing a similar manoeuvre when the spot was stolen. As noted during the kids-talking phase, words that you thought forgotten suddenly crop up.
Again, a car nips into the spot in front, and it goes quiet. Until a little voice pipes up from the back seat, “Oh, he was a bûggër.”
It’s so hard trying not to laugh to encourage him. But now, even when I call someone an idiot near my godson I’m told that, “It’s not a nice thing to say about someone.”
For Mary McCool:
I suppose it’s an opposite case, but one of my boys is brilliant but profoundly autistic. I know he can speak, I’ve heard him, but it’s so rare he is considered non-verbal. He knows all the “words” in context, as my husband has the vocabulary of a truck driver. When he gets mad, he gives you the evillest eye and stomps his feet while huffing. Each time, I look him calmly in the eye and tell him, “Ffffff! Ffffff! It starts with Ffff! Say it, and I’ll give you anything you want!” It’s usually enough to deflate his tantrum. I know, some day, some year, when I least expect it, I’ll get the F-word thrown at me, and I’ll cherish every sound.
When one of my nieces was six, she got really frustrated with a toy. After getting more and more frustrated with not being able to get it to work, she petulantly cried out, “Aw, foot!”
I love that someone taught her that “foot” was a swear word.
Cloneboy is also Parrotboy. I got a long fuse but when it goes off head for the shelter. Yeah, he’s heard some sh–shtuff. Particularly the description of solid waste that I inherited from my father. I’ll start saying it, the “SH” part lasts as long as they Gettysburg Address with all the analyses therof read in triplicate before finally arriving at the “IT” part. It’s not unlike a slow leak suddenly being truncated by sealing it with a soft boiled egg. So, anyway, he’s heard some stuff, said some stuff, amd I’m mortified every time.
“Don’t say that?” she said.
I first read that as “Don’t say what?” I thought, “Ðámņ, that kid’s crafty.”
My parents were really controlled about their language around me and my brother when we were kids; they’re actually pretty good swearers (Hey, Dad spent 26 years in the Navy, he’d better be good!), and it’s been kind of fun hearing them loosen up now that we’re all adults. If you’re going to use it, use it well, so I tend to avoid swearing around others unless I can swear well. (Kind of like how Audrey Hepburn would swear to break tension on the set of Sabrina…)
There’s the story of the time Mark Twain’s wife decided to break him of swearing – having spent a large part of his early adult years hanging out with riverboatmen and miners and muleskinners, his every day speech tended to be a bit salty.
So, for a week or two, she carefully memorised every non-standard word he used, and then, one day at breakfast she let them all fly.
He listened for a few seconds with a certain professional admiration, as it were, and then gently said “My dear, you have learnt the words but you do not yet know the tune.”
Od the “Foxtrot” sequence when Paige, babysitting for the neighbour, decided to watch some of the TV she wasn’t allowed to watch at home, and was greatly enjoying “Jerry Springer” when suddenly the four year old, with an utterly angelic expression said “*Bleep*!” (Well, you know, a bunch of typographic symbols…) And she kept on saying it.
Until Paige, driven to distraction, said “Oh, *Bloop*!”
At which point the four-year-old’s chant became “*Bleep* *Bloop*!”
And then Paige, trying to distract her, asked if she wanted to watch “Barney”. At which point … you guessed it: “*Bleep* Barney!”
And then the kid’s mother came home, and found her daughter smiling angelically (and silently) … and then said “Where did these empty peanut-butter jars come from?”
Little kids are sponges.
Parents wear the squarepants. 🙂
So when the Emmies bleeped the show did Caroline fill in the missing words?
— Ken from Chicago
P.S. That knock on the door is your friendly neighborhood Child Services. >=^>
Reading the many examples, I’d bet that Art Linkletter would have fainted, but I’d also bet that Fred Rogers would have known how to handle it.
My seven year old once had me run through all the grown-up words that she wasn’t supposed to use in school. “What other words are there, Mommy?” With definitions. And, amazingly enough, far as I know she *doesn’t* use them at all. Even the ones I sometimes use. (Happily, Americans can use “bloody” all the time, and I suspect few would know “bûggër” unless they looked in a dictionary. Though that one can turn into “Bother” quite easily. Oh, Bother…)
I use “grife”, by and large. Who says comic books aren’t good in every day life?
As for your own situation, don’t worry, we won’t tell the PTA in years to come if you won’t.
This may be a bit retro for some of you out here in PADLand, but what ever happended to Shazbot, Feldercarb, and Smeg?
I use smeg online, along with other British & Aussie slang, like bloody and bûggër. All three of those have kind of become all usage replacements for another favorite four-letter word. But I don’t use those three much in actually speaking with people.
My wife likes to use frell, from Farscape, though.
Ever since I was a kid, one of the influences comics had on me was that my most-used swear was “Son of a–!” I’d leave out the actual b-word, because that’s what the comics did (the speaker would always get interrupted or whatever). I still do it on occasion. Not too long ago, when my wife’s sister and her son were over, I said it, and she looked up in revelation at me and said “So that’s where he gets it!” Apparently my nephew had picked that up from me and used it often, heh.
I swear like a sailor. We’ll see what happens when I eventually have a child. I suspect his first word may be “frack!”
I remember when my now 3-year old was just starting to walk and talk. I was changing the lock on our front door and hit my thumb with a hammer (don’t ask why I was using a hammer, please…)
“F***!” attempting to catch myself to say it softly enough so the little kid wouldn’t hear. Yeah, right…
“f***, F***, f***, f***” she says dancing around the room.
Her mother heard the racket and came out of the bedroom asking “What’s going on?”
“F***, mommy!”
Needless to say, I had to sleep on the couch that night.
Got a good one from the husband:
When he was about five, he picked up a bit of language from his father. So one day he was watching TV and the power went out. My husband let out a loud “F**K!”
His dad asked “What did you just say?”
“F**k, Daddy!”
“That’s my boy,” his dad said, grinning proudly.
…my in-laws are a bit insane.
I find myself occasionally using “grife” (30th century epithet from the Legion), and rarely “sprock” (is that from the Legion, too?). And even “Shards!” from the Pern novels.
I suppose that’s a mark of well-rounded fiction, when you can reuse the swear words in real life.
Queen Anthai–
I think your in-laws are also my in-laws. Or they could share a padded cell.
But, thinking of it, if our in-laws are nuts, what does that say about our respective spouses?
Yeah, I agree they’re the only normal ones. Although, she DID marry me, so apparently “Sane” and “tasteful” don’t go hand in hand.
My little sister got us all in stitches one Thanksgiving. She was probably 6 or 7, and we were all sitting down to eat, but my stepfather couldn’t find the knife he wanted to cut the turkey. “Sonofabitch” he said, in his exasperation. Then my mom found the knife and handed it to him.
“I’m glad she found the knife, Pop.” My sister said.
“Why’s that, Sug.?” my stepdad.
“’cause if you didn’t find that knife then you’d say, ‘Sonofabitch! Son. Of. A. Bìŧçh. Sonofa God Ðámņëd Mother F’king BÍTÇH!!” And then she squealed laughing. He turned beet red, because everyone knew that she was exactly right. We’d heard that litany any time he was missing something and couldn’t find it after about five minutes of looking. At the table you could tell that he was almost mad at her, but we were all cracking up, so he saw which way the tides had turned and started chuckling too.
“You’re right shuggie. I probably would have said that.”
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the Pearl & Will Ferrell shorts yet:
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/74
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/33f2687080
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the Pearl & Will Ferrell shorts yet:
funnyordie.com/videos/74
funnyordie.com/videos/33f2687080
It’s not just the words. My grandson 7 came up to me the other day and very seriously asked me this question. It went something like this. Grandma, when I was inside my mommy’s belly and she and daddy had sex did it hurt me? Let me tell you that was a showstopper. I eventually told him to ask him daddy. GEEZ And I thought it was bad when my son at age 4 ran around Sunday School screaming “pëņìš, pëņìš, pëņìš…”
Cute stories!
As far as “literary cursewords”, I use “gorram” (Firefly/Serenity), and also have been known to use “frith” (Watership Down).
With our son, we’ve had pretty much the same kinds of adventures with language that most everyone responding so far has related.
No…my favorite story about parents, children and swearing has to be a friend of mine from high school. Around the age of 16, his dad came to him and said, “Rick…it just occurred to me. I’ve never heard you swear.”
To which my friend Rick replied, “Well, šhìŧ, Dad. What the fûçk do you want me to say?”