Saturday, January 15, 2011

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.

1 comment:

  1. Hi there! Now following your blog from the Let's Get Social hop. Kids never cease to amaze me with what they pick up. Mine are teens and beyond now but they still pick things up that shock me, make me proud and simply amaze me.

    Follow me back at www.artsychaos.blogspot.com Have a good one!! :)

    ReplyDelete

I welcome comments, but reserve the right to correct your spelling because I am OCD about it!