By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

They say little children are sponges, soaking up everything around them and adding it to the cache of life experiences that leads eventually to adulthood.

I have one of those little sponges tromping around the Sullivan house these days, bouncing off furniture, pulling every fragile item off of every shelf below the high water mark of her arm’s reach, overturning drink cups, tormenting the pets and soaking up every new word that comes out of her mother’s or my mouth. On the word front though my daughter is not as much a sponge as a parrot. They say kids say the darnedest things, if you’re not careful kids will say the God damndest things.

G.d. is probably the best place to start a synopsis of cussing in the English language. Those that study this kind of sh!t ..err..stuff say profanity by definition had its start in sacrilegious words. The first words defined as taboo were those that were heretical.

It didn’t take long though for sex terms to join the verboten words party and then bathroom terms joined in and with all their possible combinations left us a myriad of ways to swear. Curse word combinations are the product of a rich, nasty vocabulary and an event shocking enough in nature to cause the curser to create a new profanity just for that situation.

In all my years in school, on fishing boats, on golf courses and especially in the radio business I thought I had heard it all, but every couple months I will hear a new combination and add it to that part of my brain where I keep such insults stockpiled. All that being said, I’m not a particularly big curser. In the right situations sure I’ll drop a choice word but in the majority of my day I’m chaste with my profanity. With a child in the house that is a good thing, because my child is not completely a sponge, a child that soaks new experiences up and holds them. No, she also has a good bit of parrot in her that loves to repeat all the new words she hears each day.

The Mrs. and I had the unfair advantage of watching the young children in our family as well as those of our friends before we became parents. That advantage was educational as well as amusing. One story was that of a mother who said “ohh shoot” as a safe word replacement in a crowded store only to be corrected by her proud son in front of the cashier and customers that the term was actually “ohh shit.”

Another proud parental moment for one Mobile family was when, while they were trying to show off a 3-year-old’s intelligence and the far flung vacation location of one of the grandmothers, the parents leadingly asked the child “grandma is…” to which the child parroted “a real bitch.” I’m sure the child smiled with pride at his use of a shiny new word in his vocabulary as the parents did verbal gymnastics to try to save some face.

So with stories like this fresh in my experience I try to be doubly watchful of my word choices, but we all make mistakes. My mistake came in the form of the word crap. I was referencing a paper shredder that had lasted all of two minutes before breaking and I was on a tirade as to what a cheap piece of (yeah you guessed it) CRAP the item was when I let the term slip in front of our daughter. I tried to push past it like it was just another word, but maybe I subconsciously paused after I said it or the strong p sound at the end of the word made it alluring. Next think I knew, there it was ringing in my ear, my daughter the “word parrot” saying in her little cute voice, “crap.”

“Pay no attention to her saying the word,” I could hear voices of experience echoing in my mind. “If you don’t make a big deal about it she will soon forget the word”

I could hear the wisdom of parents through the ages in my mind. “Hi kitty kitty, meow kitty, crap” there it went again. Ohh shit what do I do now? This was a mental showdown between my daughter and me, except she didn’t know she was competing and was also about to win.

“Crap” she said again. I had already dedicated part of my mind to begin to create the reason our daughter was saying the word crap excuse for my wife when like a big purple loaf of manna from Heaven, Barney came on television to much fan fare and clapping by my daughter and an abrupt end to saying the word crap.

I can’t believe I was saved by that big purple piece of cr…uhh…stuff. I’m counting my blessings for now, but I am mindful that verbal Eden has been spoiled and the word parrot will revisit the word crap, but who the hell knows when?

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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