A Fictional Conversation?

“Daddy called that man in the car a bonehead.”

“Does that mean he has a bone in his head, or a bone for a head?”

“You’re a bonehead.”

“Am not!”

“Bonehead! Bonehead! Bonehead!”

[Hilarity ensues]

Spencer has started throwing consonants in with the vowels. We’re still at monosyllables, but in several months he’ll start associating those sounds with words, at which point he’ll soak up everything I say. (I’m not flattering myself here; I’m a laggard #2 in terms of folks that might influence his vocabulary in the near term, and it’s a short list.) At the point he starts picking up my words of wisdom, it may be best if I stop talking for a little while.

I’m not talking about salty language here, but the old “family-friendly” standbys I’ve employed over the years. (My sister Kate recently went through this with her son and the innocuous “stupid”, which goes to show that it’s just not the words but the way they’re employed that we need to watch.) As our adoption of Spencer neared, Karla began politely calling my attention to the variety of names I used in my observations of the poor driving habits of others. The fictional dialog at the top of this post came out of a conversation we had several months ago, doubtless after another driver cut me off by driving around me on the shoulder of the road. “Do you really want your children calling each other boneheads? Or calling us names?”

Kids are going to pick up words wherever they find them, and as parents we need to weed out the bad ones, just like any bad habit, but that can’t be done while advocating a double standard. Toddlers simply don’t understand “do as I say, not as I do.” (Nor for that matter do older kids, who seem to take great satisfaction in spotting parental hypocrisy.)

So I am now working to contain my use of scathing epithets. It’s an interesting exercise; I hadn’t realized how dependent I’d become on this mental shorthand to describe my perception of the behavior of others. After a recent slug-fest conference call with a particularly adversarial colleague from another department, I resisted the urge to announce to my team, “That man is a complete idiot” and instead replaced it with the less inflammatory “He’s misinformed.” It’s rough going, because, as we all know, people around us present almost irresistible targets for ridicule. Being in the great and spacious building sure is fun! (Until it’s not.) At least I’ve got a few months to hone this before it dawns on the kid that all those sounds actually mean something.

Is this a fool’s errand? Check back with me when Spencer’s got a vocabulary and we’ll see.