![]() I'm a writer and high school teacher, so the music of the word alone grabbed me, not to mention its myriad meanings. I suppose, in retrospect, we paid far too much attention to an otherwise harmless word that I'm sure would have faded, like all the other sounds my son gives voice to during any given week. My wife is a folk artist and there were many objects among our many collections for him to choose from - bottle-cap men, ceramic cars from Mexico, strings of red chile lights. He searched around the room, trying to find an object to attach to the two syllables. "What did you say?" I forced a phony smile to throw him off the scent. "Hey, London," I called as casually as I could. ![]() "What did he say?" she mouthed at me, careful not to alert our daughter that this word had some thorns. ![]() My wife and I looked back at him in unison, not dropping our forks, but definitely halting the chew. "Pussy!" he yelled, Thomas above his head, weighting his fist like a roll of pennies. London had just declared that he was finished with his meal and, not restricted by the rules of eating that the rest of us subscribe to, he began to run around the room, holding a Thomas the Tank Engine figure in the sticky tunnel of his closed hand. The first time London uttered the word, we were sitting at the dinner table - me, my wife, the boy and his 7-year-old sister, Poppy. Just before Christmas, my 2-year-old son, London, started saying the word "pussy." As the father of two, I understand that new words stick to 2- and 3-year-olds like toilet paper to the bottom of your shoe, yet this ideogramic discovery struck me as different from the others.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |