“Pre-Cursers” - That Moment When Your Little One’s Language Takes A Big Turn

            “Mommy,” my three-year old son pipes from his car seat behind me, “Did you know that beavers live in a dam?”

            “That’s right.”

            “They live in a dam,” he repeats. Giggles. While I can’t see his round, curl-framed face in the rearview mirror I can see my daughter, three years older and one seat over, looking at him with an admiring, deep-dimpled grin.

            Oh! He had learned the old curse word that actually doubles as a word that is “appropriate.”  Ha!

            Since I was a teenager I have fully embraced the release that a beefy-mouthed curse provides in moments of frustration and anger (sorry, Mom). But all cursing in my home had been suspended with the arrival of my kids; as little as I had known about childrearing, observations of the brave souls who had spawned before me had taught me that babes pick up everything, right out of the womb.

So although I had laughed my butt off as a kid watching The Bad News Bears characters continuously f-bombing each other and Coach Buttermaker (and got in trouble for laughing when I got home – come on Mom, you were the one who took me to that movie!), when I got older the occasional specter of real little tykes uttering obscenities struck me as off-putting. My Personal Cursing Guideline:  There’s plenty of time for cursing after childhood – say, from the teen years on.

            It was when my husband and I went out alone, far out of earshot of our kids, that we would let loose (ok, it was mostly me), using that same exaggerated inflections my son had used when saying dam: “How the f- are ya! Sh-, did you hear about such and such…? Wow, that really sucked!”   

            As careful as we had been around our children, I realized that the shape shifting “damn/dam” had slickly slipped through the cracks. Though amused that the kids had already caught on to this, I refrained from laughing so as not to encourage them (see Personal Cursing Guideline above).  I had to address the issue, but I also knew that even at their young ages I had to play it cool.

I say:  “Ok, there’s a dam that’s a beaver’s home and there’s a damn that’s a curse. We don’t use the curse word, got it?” [Dramatic Pause For Effect.] “It’s inappropriate and it makes adults mad.” (I left out the part about how mad adults very much like to use it.)

            I craned my neck for a better view of both kids in the rearview mirror and could see them still smiling at each other, chubby-cheeked, as they said uttered a weak and thoroughly unconvincing, “Yeeeeesss.” 

I wondered if the little sponges had picked up on my subtext; for though I had studied English in college and have an Inner Grammarian holding court in the reading/writing lobes of my brain, my mischievous Inner Word Lover and Sometimes Poet loves to skewer, skin and sculpt words into new forms. It’s this part of me that takes tremendous amusement in the word damn’s phonetic contortions. For example:

            There is The Loud, Hot Damn of Anger:

“Damn it!” (Var. Dang it, Darn it.)

“Damn you!”

“Damn-it-to-hell!”

           

There is The Damn of Awe that  s l o w l y  exits the mouth trailed by an ellipsis:

“Damn…”

“Hot damn…”

“Well I’ll be damned…”

Then there are those Demographically Designed Damns and Other Cursing Combos that endlessly tickle the funny bone of my Inner Word Lover and Sometimes Poet:

“Got-damn-it!” and “DAYUM!” Such satisfying southern twists!

“Dag nabbit!” Ye olde Warner-Brothers’ sly solution to cartoon cursing.

“Don’t be sech a dayum foo’!” Current slang doesn’t hold a candle to old standbys like one.

Even my father, who lost his ability to speak following a massive stroke, is able to eek out his own protracted version of the word:

“Damn-in-in-in!” (The fact that my son had not said, “Beavers live in dam-in-in-in,” gave my father an instant pass as a person who did NOT teach my kids the curse.)

Bar none, some of the most fun I ever had cursing was as a kid, joining in with my brothers, cousins and friends to shout the newest bad words we were learning in the very old ‘Name Game’ song: 

“DAMN IT, DAMN IT, bo bammit. Banana-fanna fo fammit. Fee-fi-fo mammit. DAMN IT!”

Ok, I’m busted; so much for having lived that Personal Guideline of mine. I guess I’ve been embracing the release of a good ol’ curse for longer than I care to admit. And naturally, until something else had caught their attention my kids continued using “beaver dam.” Each time they said it, I have to admit to chuckling on the inside. On the outside, I get miles and miles out of retelling that dam story.