What do you call that thing?
As regular readers know, me and the Mrs. are having a girl. We’re very excited. Yesterday, the Mrs. brought up something we have to address at some point. As we’re sitting at lunch, the Mrs. asks me what I thought we should call private parts in front of our child. I, jokingly, said . . . well, think of the most offensive word for it you can and it’s not quite the word I used but is reasonably close (Hint: may or may not rhyme with latch). I was joking, of course. The Mrs. didn’t find that joke funny.
I know a guy who had a severe speech impediment that required therapy up through high school. The doctor’s opinion was that it was caused because his parents baby-talked to him for too long. Here was a 15 year-old kid who called cows moo-moos. I am not making that up. He also struggled with Rs and Ls; he had that whole Fudd thing going. It’s twue. I wouldn’t puw youw weg.
And I hate some degree of baby talk. Any bodily function or part that is referred to by repeating the same syllable just sounds childish. An adult shouldn’t have to say tee-tee, pee-pee, poo-poo, or ka-ka. So, we want to avoid the whole baby talk thing.
Conversely, vagina, defecate, and urinate are all a bit too sterile. They don’t make us future parents comfortable.
It is odd that if we were having a boy, I would have thousands of names for penis (which I won’t list here). Of course, finding a clean sounding name may be a bit tough. As a guy, I also have thousands of names for breasts. None of which I will ever use to refer to my daughter’s breasts.
So, we’re stumped. I figure we got about two years before it comes up. We got some thinking to do. Any suggestions are welcome.
February 15th, 2004 at 1:42 pm
GeeketteWithA9mm & I just went through the same danged thing. Sadly, we couldn’t find a single neutral or positive euphamism for “vagina”, and dry and technical though it may be, “vagina” it is.
We also agree on the baby talk thing, and rarely “talk down” to the kids. Just about the only concession are the bathroom terms, which seem to have settled around “dupa,pee, and poop”, as in “Did you wipe your dupa after you pooped?” or “Do you need to pee?”
February 15th, 2004 at 2:51 pm
Interesting that you use “dupa” — is your family slavic? I had never heard it before until I started dating my girlfriend, whose family is slavic.. I believe it just means “ass/backside” in Polish, possibly other slavic derivatives..
Being the left-brained kind of guy that I am, I have never been able to reconcile the fact that people call the general female genitalia “the vagina”, because, well, it’s not. And calling it your “vulva” is eventually going to get some weird looks from her peers.
I recommend going with “bottom”. It works sufficiently while she’s young enough that she doesn’t need an anatomy lesson. She just needs to know what to wipe.
February 15th, 2004 at 4:38 pm
having no children, and never having to deal with this, I naturally asked the wife… yeah… wait for it… seemingly it was known as the “front-bottom”.. hey, don’t ask me… Scots are strange that way.. “bottom and front-bottom”.. go figure..
February 16th, 2004 at 8:03 am
Most of my siblings avoid any sort of baby-talk or euphemisms with their kids, save “poop” and “pee” — and that seems to work. My 2 year old nephew refers to his “Willie”, which is pretty funny.
February 16th, 2004 at 10:44 am
My in-laws thought it wasn’t classy enough to teach their little girl baby-talk words for bodily functions, which led to major complications when Arkansawyer Granny Dee was babysitting, and she who is now my wee wifey needed to defacate.
February 16th, 2004 at 11:04 am
Nope, I’m not Slavic myself, but geeketteWithA9mm has some Lithuanian tucked away in her pedigree somewhere.
I grew up in CT, which has a fairly large Polish population, so it probably came from that.
February 16th, 2004 at 12:35 pm
My grandmother used to call the penis a “bird.” As a small child, after peeing in the bathroom, she would remind me (unnecessarily, I might add) to “shake your bird” to get that last drop off.
The only term I can remember being used to describe the female equivalent was “dookie,” but that’s pretty childlike. Boobs are easy, because there’s nothing wrong with “boobs.”
Really, I don’t think there’s a problem with using baby-talk names for such parts up until the toddler stage. After that, there’s usually not any need to refer to the parts by name. When you say “don’t forget to wipe,” they generally know what you mean.
February 16th, 2004 at 2:30 pm
There’s always “number 1 and number 2,” though that can lead to problems. My first college roommate somehow never managed to encounter those terms when he was growing up. His girlfriend used the terms and he was completely baffled, so she had to explain them.
He apparently didn’t understand that those are common terms, and thought they were a secret code that only the two of them knew. The next time they were at a restaurant, he said within earshot of the whole table, “Be back in a minute. I have to go number two.”
February 16th, 2004 at 7:23 pm
Well, the other person mentioned Arkansas first.
Cooter.
As in, “Earlene, you make shore you warsh yore cooter when you git a bath!”
(Stolen from Acidman’s blog)
February 16th, 2004 at 7:39 pm
I may have to rule out dukes of hazzard characters 🙂
February 16th, 2004 at 8:00 pm
It’s worse than you think. I had Cooter (Jones) for my Congressman when I lived in Atlanta.
February 16th, 2004 at 11:37 pm
We use “privates” or “pee pee” for our little girl & boy.