Kid Words

I started out writing this as a comment on M-Schwa's blog, but then it started to get kind of long, so I thought it would be better to just make it an entry on my own blog.
It's funny to think back on your childhood and remember erroneous names that you would call different things.
My parents were pretty good about reinforcing the proper names of things for me, like my grandparents were always Grandma and Grandpa Hayes, and Grandma and Grandpa Schweppe; never did we call them Nana, Papa, B-pa, Popsy, Poopsie, or whatever.
But there were a few that would slip.
The biggest one that comes to mind when I was a kid was going to play on "danger." When I was like 3 or 4, and my mom and I used to go for little walks around the block, every time we got near one of those big, rectangular, metal sewer grates, she would say, "No-no. Stay away from that. That's danger!" EVERY time. So I thought it was actually called "danger," instead of "sewer grate."
And that didn't keep me away from it.
Like most children, doing things that were forbidden made them more exciting to me, more tempting.
I always wanted to play near the "danger."
I actually have a picture of me and one of the neighbor kids sitting on "danger."
It's cute. I'll see if I can get it scanned and posted on here.

The other thing that became an issue for me growing up was only knowing certain words in another language.
My mother is exactly 50/50, Polish/German, and being a matriarchal family, we had a lot of Polish influences in our development.
For years I thought everyone called their ass "dupa."
That was the only word I ever knew for it.
Like: "Stop doing that right now, or you're going to get spanked in the dupa!"
Or, if you had to make #2, or go potty, or whatever you might call it, for us was always "going bebbes" or "making bebbes." (I'm not entirely sure how to spell that one, but that's as close phonetically as you can get, and now that I look back on it, it's utterly hilarious how much that sounds like "making babies." Sorry, Jeffy, if you actually read this.)
Then there were the foods.
(It can't be a TM-blog without some mention of food.)
Pierogi, gołobki (pronounced ga-wump-key: it's a cabbage stuffed with some kind of hamburger-helper-esque ground beef, or something like that), and kielbasa and sauerkraut were all major staples in the Hayes house.
I guess it's no wonder I'm a vegetarian with choices like that.
Then if you were eating too quickly, or sloppily, you were being a świniak (shveen-yahk: male pig)
Everything is gender-specific in Polish. A female is a świnia.
And even though swearing in English was strictly verboten in the Hayes house, it was not uncommon to be called gówno głowa (gohv-na gwoh-va: shit head), or if the mood was a little more genial, something more like kapusta głowa (kuh-poos-tuh gwoh-va: cabbage head), which is considered a more jovial insult.
And that's your language lesson for the day.
Just like Ellen says: It's education and entertainment: Edutainment!