just as good

[burnunit]

My older kid, you may remember her as Eleanor, swears. We got her to stop saying "what the hell?" (amending it to just "what the...?"). And she doesn't use any of the choice words I like--no f-word yet thank goodness. But I think she's invented a swear word or two. When she's embarrassed/annoyed with herself, like she's make a mistake, dropped something, or started to say/do something then thought better of it or edited herself, she uses a word "sart". She explained to me in her typically lucid fashion, "you say 'sart' when you say it you do something if you do something and it's just like you did it, it's 'sart'." Uh, yeah. I tried to use it once in the exact apologetic/embarrassed tone she uses, and she said "no, daddy! don't say that you can't say sart." A word that appeared around the same time as sart, is "pliffet" or "pliffend" or "pliffid" or something.

Well, the more I think about it, the more I like these invented words. In particular sart. It's short, it's punchy enough, and it's a great stand in for shit/crap/darn/dang/hell especially in the self-effacing tone. "shit I dropped that" or "oh crap I forgot the milk" and the like. It reminds me, incidentally, of satori (by way of mispronunciation I suppose) in that it's like a slap against the forehead in a moment of personal insight. Sart, I missed my bus. Oh sart that meeting starts in five minutes.

I don't understand the meaning she's attached to pliffid yet, though.

Comments

[gunn.livejournal.com]

Sart?

[automa-tom.livejournal.com]

Has she been reading any existential philosophy lately? You might have a gifted child on your hands. Although, reading Sartre at four years old is probably a baaaaaad sign.

[elfgirlgamanda.livejournal.com]

"Oh Monkey!"

[beverlypenn.livejournal.com]

i like the connection you made to satori. it seems apt.

As an analogy, we may think of a baby when it first walks. After much effort, it stands upright, finds its balance and walks a few steps (kensho), then falls. After continued effort the child will one day find that it is able to walk all the time (satori).

[(Anonymous)]

So she'll be writing for Farscape and Battlestar Galactica soon, eh?

- Fred

[r0ckc4ndy.livejournal.com]

One of my closest friends has a 4 year old who literally from the day she was born picks up the craziest stuff, and has a wicked sense of humor. And trying to get a three year old to stop yelling candy-ass out the window while simultaneously laughing hysterically is pretty hard. We don't, by the way, yell that out the window, but she got it from somewhere...