"You're Freaking Crazy"

[RayPowers]

Additional (to me) funny info; my wife is dead against "potty jokes." Like when my daughter farts (and she farts like a trucker) and they laugh, she gets annoyed and tells them it's not polite.

To me, whatever. If ever there is a time for "potty humor" to be funny, it's when you are 4 and 5 years old. You can be more serious when you're older...

Ray

[Blarg]

I agree on most of that, but kids' judgment is pretty poor. They're more likely to stand up on top of their chair in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner and go, Hey Daddy! Listen to me fart!, and then burst out laughing after blowing a butt bubble. So sometimes you have to be extra diligent until they learn how to handle themselves.

You can fool around a lot, but you still have to be careful things like farts or swearing keep their edgy status as something you have to be very careful doing and that are not quite right. Heck, that they're naughty makes them more fun anyway.

[jfk]

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...I'd much prefer to have my kids learn useful adjectives and other words so they don't become reliant on "freaking" (and then later, reliant on "f***ing").

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This is a very good point.

There's a certain disservice being done to kids when they're allowed to get linguistically lazy in using these sorts of verbal crutches.

As it sounds like you're the sort of parent who spends a fair amount of time in the company of their children, challenging this sort of conversation is one of the ways in which your impact as a parent can be felt.

There's no real harm in your kids calling each other "freaking crazy", but there is subtle benefit in your teaching your kids why they should seek alternatives and the reasons why they should be mindful and deliberate about speech.

[RayPowers]

Blarg, I agree, and we tend to emphasize the difference between how they act with company vs when its just us. That being said, I think the entire table would crack up if my daughter pulled that at Thanksgiving. :P

jfk and SoloAJ: I agree. I think at this age, however, freaking is an alternative to saying a bad word, so it is, in a way teaching them to seek alternatives. I'm not sure they're old enough to grasp the idea of being too deliberate in their speech. From their perspective, they've only been speaking for a couple years. They're not completely proficient at it yet. Nonetheless, I'll work on it.

Ray

[MrWookie]

I don't have a whole lot to contribute, but I like this thread, and I think Aces raises a good point. In my conversations today, I don't really notice if someone uses a curse word as an exclamation. Where it raises my eyebrows is if they're using curse words to add emphasis where a larger vocabulary would be more appropriate.

[Mrs. Utah]

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To me, whatever. If ever there is a time for "potty humor" to be funny, it's when you are 4 and 5 years old. You can be more serious when you're older...

Ray

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Really? You guys should hang out with a bunch of nurses. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

[Mrs. Utah]

Ray

I tend to side with you here. Yes, you want to teach your kids what is and isn't appropriate. A lot of that is teaching by example.
And yes sometimes you slip. So you say, "Sorry kids, that was rude and not appropriate..." or whatever and move on.

Nobody lives in a bubble though. Kids hear things and the best you can do is try and teach them the best and most appropriate way to express themselves, without driving them crazy.

[Blarg]

Yeah. I remember during second grade, and starting even earlier, the most thrilling thing in life was to learn a new curse word. We'd spout them non-stop to each other even though we didn't even know what half of them meant. It was a badge of honor to know a new one and would lead to at least days of minor celebrity, and it was a small miracle to actually know what one meant. Unless you lock them in the house forever, kids will be hearing stuff that would make you blanch at a very young age and lobbing it around like nobody's business when adults aren't around.

[Coffee]

Tell your wife that she's the one who's crazy and if she doesn't like it, she can go [censored] herself.

[SoloAJ]

Blarg, I agree that it is the spirit that should be critiqued. I think I admitted in my post above (I meant to anyway, if not), that I was on a slight tangent, but that it still helped explain why I felt kids shouldn't use those words too often. But I entirely agree that the words themselves aren't the main debate.

And I agree with what you said about kids' judgment being poor. To me, that is the biggest reason kids should not use dirty words. The substitute, in this case, is obviously much better than the real word; it just sort of leads toward a narrow vocabulary in many cases (which I don't really like, as a concept). The youth today is pretty bad about being unable to describe a story or scene because they rely on the same indescript words...

pryor, "F***ing is fun," I believe, is a gerund. I should know this for sure, but I've been the first to admit that being an English major isn't about knowing everything...it is about being smart enough to realize you don't know it all and go look it up. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] And I agree that the words themselves shouldn't necessarily be taboo. But given that our society DOES view them as such, I do think it is impolite or disrespectful to use them in certain settings (like a diner or something). It becomes much more acceptable to me in a place like a bar, where there is all sorts of dirty deeds being done already [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img].

And as a sidenote, though I'm not sure jfk was referring to me (rather than Ray), I am not a baby daddy yet. But I damn sure like reading threads like this so I can both gather ideas of parents and reject ones that seem "not my style" (Ray's wife seems a bit exaggerated here). Haha.