My grandparents had a vacation house on St. Martin, so we vacationed there a lot. I don’t remember how old I was at the time this story took place, but I must have been 9> .
My parents had been grumbling about something or other, using the phrase “third-world country”. I had never heard of such a thing before, so they told me it was a country that was less developed and didn’t have so many modern things.
Unfortunately, I was a very literal-minded kid, and no one thought to specify that “third-world” was somewhat perjorative.
Next day, we’re out shopping for groceries, and we can’t find something we’re looking for. “Well,” I said (proabably loud enough for the whole store to hear), “after all, it IS a third-world country.” I’m sure my mother wanted to sink into the floor.
In a little kid pronunciation, the “See Kyle” would run together and sound rather like the kid was repeating an offensive chant “popularized” around WWII.
Here’s one from last year. Fortunately, I have a high threshold of embarrassment; my wife, not so much.
We were in a JCPenney’s, and my little girl, then 2, had to go to the potty. She’d only been potty trained for two months or so, so she was still mighty proud of herself. Anyway, I stood with the stroller while she went to the potty with Momma.
Several minutes later, they’re coming back. She sees me a long way off, so she shouts loud enough for me (and everyone else) to hear, “DADDY, I MADE A POOP! THERE WAS A BIG ONE, AND A LITTLE ONE!” And repeated it, twice, with accompanying “big” and “little” gestures. My wife, following along behind, was quite embarrassed, but I just laughed and praised her pooping skills.
As I said in my initial post, my son was in a phase of blaming other kids for things that didn’t happen. Another example is when I gave him a cookie at home, just the two of us, and he comes walking up to me saying “Lazarus ate my cookie”…
Nobody bit his penis, it was diaper rash, he didn’t know he couldn’t include penises in the imaginary-kid-wrongdoings game and said that to the doctor who was examining his inflamed penis.
The scene: I am thirteen. My little brother is five. We’re meeting the new husband of a longtime friend of our parents.
My darling brother walks over to him, looks up, and says, “Your tummy is sooooo fat!”
I wanted to die on the spot. Fortunately the man in question found it hilarious. And went on to have two boys, so obviously my brother didn’t scare him off or anything.
As told by my mother (she does a better job), this one is about me:
When he was around 3 years old we pulled over in the country at this little store that had a phone booth outside. I needed to make a call (that’s how we survived in the days before cell phones, BTW). I told him he could get out of the car while I made the call as long as he stayed out of the road. In the middle of the call I hear car horns beeping and quickly turn to the road to see him standing at the edge, facing the road, shorts around his ankles and peeing. Embarrassed and infuriated, I hung up, grabbed him by the arm and gave him a tongue lashing. Finally I finished with a "Why didn’t you at least turn around the other way??!! He looked up at me innocently and said, “But then they could see my butt!”
Kids’ mispronunciations and made-up words can be adorable. But I’ll never forget the one day at badminton, during that kind of total silence that only occurs in busy places when something embarrassing’s about to be said, when my daughter called out ‘Mummy, do you want a suck a cock?’
