Playdoh, Farts, and the S Word

I received a phone call last month from an administrator at my son's school.  (I'm just getting around to writing about it, because cancer.)  My son used the 'S' word. At school. No, not that s-word.  My son said the word S-E-X. Three times. During school hours and on school property, no less.  The earth did not open beneath him, and there were no lightning bolts of divine retribution.  In fact, the only way that the school learned of this particular infraction was because one of Zane's classmates went home and told his/her parent.  

That's totally understandable, that a child would speak to their parents about the things that go on at school.  My son tells me many interesting things about the students in his class and what they say, and I nod and smile and we move on.  I don't even blink anymore.  They're seven, after all. We discuss the appropriateness of these topics briefly, just enough to get the point across, and we move on.  Other parents do not have my casual response to such events, and Catholic schools tend to err on the side of crazy when they get these letters.

And I got a phone call. 

It wasn't a horrible phone call, as phone calls go.  Zane didn't even rate the actual principal, which would have been a big deal.  No, we got the assistant principal on the phone, who got right to the point. While the assistant principal is speaking, my brain is turning over every possible place that Zane might have heard the word 'sex' enough that it made an impression.  If the school had called and told me that Zane was discussing lopping the heads off of Orcs, I wouldn't have batted an eye. I know exactly where that stuff comes from! But we don't watch shows with sex in them, not as a family.  The raciest show we watch is The Big Bang Theory, fer cryin' out loud!  Where did he hear that word?

Zane did admit to the assistant principal that he used the word; he said that it was an adult word that he wasn't supposed to use at school.  He indicated to the assistant principal that he would not ever use the word at school again.

Case closed.

Except then the AP mentioned that they sent my son to talk to the school counselor/athletic director about the whole episode.  The counselor had Zane play while they discussed his use of the word 'sex', I guess to make sure that he hadn't been traumatized or something.  The counselor gave Zane Play-doh.  Play-doh is an excellent tool for play therapy in counseling; you do not give Play-doh to a child with whom you would like to actually converse.  My conversation with Zane that afternoon, as a result, went something like this:

Me: "So...what did you talk to the counselor about this afternoon?"

Zane: "Nothing. *giggles* Did you know that Play-doh makes a farting noise when you smash it? Oh, and I'm not supposed to say 'fart' at school."

Me:  "..."

Needless to say, Zane felt that the entire episode was fun and entertaining.  He thought that he might like to "talk" some more to the counselor. About the Play-doh, and possibly farts.

He'd already moved on.

Yeppers

Yes. I'm all for plain-speaking; say exactly what you mean and don't beat around the bush, or hem and haw.  Rip that verbal band-aid right off, I usually say.  Spit it out, preferably in ten words or less, before my attention span wanders off.  I am the very last person who would blather on for ten minutes about my colon before getting close to a point.  In fact, people often refer to me as abrupt, especially at work, because I often just walk up and start saying what I need to say without even bothering with the courtesy of "hello" first.  When I am in a groove, when my brain is running on all 5.32 cylinders, I get very focused on one thing.  This is what I need, I'll say, then wait for a response impatiently; when I want to know, I want to know NOW.  Give me my piece of cheese first, and then you can talk about the maze while I munch.

And yet...I have acquired a few odd verbal habits over the years.  Nothing monstrous, nothing that requires speech therapy or a good smack upside the head.  Just little verbal idiosyncrasies. One of them is shoplifting words. My brain is always listening for the odd turn of a phrase, or the random bright and shiny word, and when it finds them, they are gobbled up and tossed into the salad that is my own sort of language.

I have no idea where I found "yeppers".  Probably it was lying, passed out cold, under a park bench after a particularly bad all-day bender, and I felt sorry for it. I'm as much a sucker for a lost word as I am for an underdog. I am not even sure if it is even a word, but it sounds interesting, and it seems to imply the affirmative, so there it is, smack dab between "Okey-Dokey" and "Ja".   People seem to understand what I mean when I say it, and nobody in all these years has stopped to ask me what the heck I am talking about.  Of course, they could be saying such things to themselves, not wanting to be considered impolite.  My son, who is still very spontaneous, will speak right up and ask me what a "yeppers" is, every time.  I still don't have a good answer for him.  

Surely I'm not the only one who picks up the odd word here and there.  My husband will randomly throw in the word "negativos!" just because a long ago Spanish teacher used to scream it at him during class.  There have to be others who have acquired the odd word here and there from mere contact with the outside world.  It's inevitable, with all of our interactions with the many, many people we encounter each day through the years.  If you do have any random words floating about, leave them in the comments, just as you would a penny in one of those "have a penny/need a penny" dishes at a cash registers.  Maybe I'll find a new shiny to replace "yeppers". 

Creativity With Words

When my son was younger, we were concerned about his language.  He was a preemie, and preemies have a higher likelihood of learning issues.  We are watching him, just in case.  When Zane was around fifteen months, he got sick, and the few words he knew went away.  We were concerned about it, enough to take him to see someone about it.  Once he hit the daycare, his language took off running, and he's never looked back.  Since then, I have had fun listening to him acquire words and begin to use them in sentences.  He's got a hellacious auditory memory--he seems to remember songs after only one hearing, and he can recite almost verbatim what he hears other people saying(hence my concern about profanity!).  He certainly has been exposed to an expansive vocabulary. 

Zane isn't waiting for us to tell him words, however.  He's made a few of them up all on his own.  It took my husband and I a little while to catch on.  We are a bit slow.  But once we realized that our child was playing with language, that he was creating his own version, we couldn't be prouder.   He seems to be fond of onomatopoeia.  When a video game character causes an explosion of some sort,  Zane says that the character got "boomed" up.  When a character on the show Ninjago gets attacked with a sword, Zane says that he was "shinged", which is the sound effect that the sword makes when it is pulled from the scabbard.    Zane says "last day" instead of  "yesterday", which is our clue that he hasn't quite got the full concept of elapsed time.  Lots of things have happened "last day" in Zaneworld!

We have tried to expose Zane to as many words as we can, and we will continue to do that.  As long as he's interested in what we have to teach him, we will keep trying.  My husband always tells Zane the definitions of the words he uses around Zane, which is better than telling him to "look it up."  I have been tempted to ask Zane what he thinks the word means based on how it was used, but I am not sure that it is developmentally appropriate.  I do wait for Zane to ask me about the word, because I know that if he asks me about the word, he is attending.  But the words sink in either way, and that is the point. The vocabulary expands, reading skills improve, and teachers write nice notes home for that sort of stuff. 
 

New Word

I was working with Zane on a puzzle, which he seems to love these days. He was trying to put a piece of the puzzle in upside down, and was using kid logic--if it doesn't "fit", whack it a few times until it does. (which pretty much describes my dating life in college, actually. *badoom-kish!*)

"Zane, if you turn that piece the other way..." I reached for the piece. Zane snatched it away from me.

"No, Foo! I do it!" He said.

"What the heck is he saying?" I looked at my husband, who was sitting on the couch playing on his laptop. In his usual helpful manner, Larry shrugged.

Twice more, for various reasons, we heard Zane say "Foo!" After the third time, that little refrigerator light in my head clicked on.

Not "Foo!"

"Fool!" My son was calling me a fool. Using it appropriately in a sentence and everything, which would normally be celebrated a lot. We don't know where he picked this word up, but daycare seems the likely culprit.

We've tried explaining to Zane that calling someone a fool, however true it might be, is "not nice", but so far he isn't buying it. I actually kind of prefer "Foo!" to "Stoo-pid", which is what he was calling me last week. (If we're lucky, next week he'll be calling me a "cretin". I'll be happy about that one, should it occur. THAT word is on the SAT.)