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.