My Son the Word Generator

When we arrived at the daycare yesterday evening, Zane's teacher, Ms.YoGabbaGabba!(that's what Zane calls her) met us at the door. She reported that Zane had had a brief altercation with his current BFF, Ethan, during an activity. Zane settled things the way small children do: he called Ethan a "poopy-a**".

We were shocked, and quickly we reassured the teacher that we had NO idea where he had heard such a word. And that we NEVER used that particular word. I think we were convincing in our parental horror. We packed Zane up and got into the car.

Larry started off by wondering aloud where Zane heard that word. I was quick to point out that Larry had used the word "poopyhead" at one point in discussing politics. And "dum-dum". And "stupid". And "crap". I probably wasn't all that innocent in my word usage, either, but my personal memory bank had mysteriously been wiped clean by the fact that I had slept. My husband and I could not think of a single time where we had used the word "a**". We don't know where Zane got that word.

But the more I thought about it, Zane's usage of "poopy-a**" was actually a GOOD thing. Because he actually took a word he had heard my husband use, "poopyhead", deleted part of the word, and added another word he had picked up somewhere, to create a BRAND NEW WORD. That's pretty darn smart for a three year old, to manipulate language to create a new word, all by himself. So this is very much a wonderful occurrence, then, and we would normally be praising Zane for his ingenuity IF he had chosen to create a different word.

We will not do that, of course. At least we probably won't.