Saturday, October 17, 2009

Potty Mouth

Udo swears like a sailor. Bit of a no-brainer, really, as I swear like a sailor and he lives in my house. He began swearing at a very early age, because like his brother before him, he never pays any attention to anything I say unless it's something I don't particularly want him to hear.


When he was about 18 months old, he was watching me attempt to install a screen in the living room window. Our house is old, our windows are crappy wood frame rope-and-pulley dinosaurs, and all the ropes are broken. The windows don't stay open, and have a tendency to come crashing down on a person's forearms. This is exactly what happened, and I'm happy to report that I did not swear. I did one of those clenched-teeth growly Yosemite Sam "Why you urrrrgh......." type of things, but Udo swore for me:

"Fuckin' hell, Mommy!"


One morning we were running late, as usual, and I was having a hard time getting him in to the car. I dropped my keys and my morning can of diet Coke, which promptly burst, and I couldn't seem to work the buckle on Udo's little child safety seat. Car seats, in general, are designed by child-hating ex-Nazi sadomasochists, and his was no exception. I was grumbling and sighing and fumbling with the latch, and Udo pipes up:


"Jethuth Chritht, Mommy!"

I scolded him for saying it. "That's a terrible, naughty thing to say, Udo!"


His brother Cold Fire says, with an eye-roll and a smirk, "Well, HE wouldn't say it if YOU didn't say it."

"Thanks for the tip, kid," I replied.


He's right; it's probably wrong of me to scold the child for his foul mouth when I'm the one who taught him all the profanity he knows. Lately when he hears profanity from me he recognizes it, and questions me:

"What did you say, Mommy?" he asks with great interest, sounding like an eager undergraduate who's trying to take very careful notes.

"Oh, Udo, Mommy said a naughty grown-up word. Only grown-ups can say naughty words; little boys cannot."

Udo agrees. "Oh, yes...that's a naughty word for grown-ups. Don't you say that word, Udo!"

For a while, his favorite phrase was "What the hell??" and he used it with impunity. He inserted it in to his favorite song from "The Nightmare Before Christmas," so that it became "What the hell is this??" instead of "What's This?"

"Oh, Udo, don't say that" we told him. "That's naughty."


Now he says, "What the naughty?" instead. "What the naughty is that noise?" "What the naughty are you doing, Mommy?" Etc.

Recently he directed his foul mouth at me. I was on the computer, and he was playing with his little trucks and cars on the kitchen floor. There was a sort of crashing sound, and I heard him say:

"Oh, Udo...what you done? Mommy said don't do that, Udo. She such a bitch! Ooooh, Udo, don't you say that naughty grown up word!"

Serves me right, I guess

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