I made a run to the grocery store today, and as I left, my daughter asked me to get some “monkey fruit” - because if she says banana in front of her toddler and we don’t have one, things will get unpleasant.
Do you or did you have similar ways of masking what you wanted to say in the presence of little (or other) ears? Or maybe faking an incoming text to get out of an annoying situation? Do tell…
Sometimes when I need to communicate certain things to a parent in front of a child that does not need to know about ongoing litigation, I will say something like–“Ok, thanks for coming in. I’ll see you at the place where we’ll do the thing” rather than “Meet me at the courthouse and we’ll have a hearing to get a restraining order against your violent meth addled baby daddy”.
Not nearly as compelling as Oakminster’s example, but we can’t say the word ‘walk’ in front of our dogs.
I got into the habit of always spelling out B-A-L-L when I had a homeschooled Border Collie who taught himself how to speak English. Still do it, and he’s been gone three years.
Oh my gosh, we have to phrase everything so carefully around the dogs. I would never say the word “out” for instance. I say, “Honey, I think it’s time to open the door.” Never the word “food”; instead it’s “Don’t you think it’s time to serve?”
When referring to authority figures at work, my friend and I always call them “Bobs”, as in Office Space. “I was fixing to come over there…see any Bobs?” “Yeah, the little one.” “Oh, never mind then.”
Aw, man, this makes me wish I was still working so I could use it! Brilliant!!!
I don’t ask Mrs. Plant (v.3.0) if the dogs have been out, I ask if they have powdered their noses.
Our shih-tzu simply & quickly recognized the meaning of the spelled word anyway. E-A-T…she’d still come running like a maniac.
beat
The Collie spoke English?
There was a horse at the riding place I used to go to that knew “trot”. And “T-R-O-T”. And “fast”. And would go into a trot whenever she heard you use them, whether you were talking to her or not.
But he couldn’t say DiMaggio.
Haha, that was a helluva mistype there–although I’m convinced he knew every word I said and was replying telepathically. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a herding dog STARE you know what I’m talking about. 
My old RatTerrier could understand many, many words. Too many to list. The wildest one was the word ‘fireworks’
She did not like fireworks. It wasn’t like we were using them every weekend. Maybe twice a year I relented and let Mr. Wrekker and the kids get them. As soon as we spoke the word she was alarmed and looking for places to hide. Afterwords you could say the word for days and she would bark angrily at you. She seemed to know it was over for awhile.
The lil’wrekker, you couldn’t mention Teletubbies to. She was afraid of them for some reason. Her two sibs got lots of milage out of that.
My beagle Betsy, very food motivated. Any food. All food.
If she thinks you might be going to the kitchen she follows. Sometimes she makes me hungry waiting on me to get up to go to the kitchen.
We had one dog, Max, who had a pretty good vocabulary of words he knew, and he, too, got very excited if he heard the word “walk.” It got to the point that my wife resorted to the German word “schpaziren” (which means “walk”), which Max never actually figured out.
Similarly, Max figured out that the word “bone” was used when it was time for him to get his evening Milk-Bone treat, and so, that word, too, led to tremendous excitement; in that case, my wife started saying it backwards (“enob”).
One evening, just after we got married, I was in the living room, watching a Milwaukee Brewers baseball game; Max was sound asleep on the couch next to me. The Brewers’ pitcher that night was named Ricky Bones (surname pronounced “bonus”). My wife walked into the room, saw the game on TV, and saw this player with “BONES” on the back of his jersey. She asked, “Is his name actually ‘Bones’??” Max was roused from his slumber by the magic word, and immediately sat up, staring at my wife, expecting a treat.
That was what my mother and sisters did when I was real little: “ydnac” and “eci maerc”.
We had dogs who learned to spell B I S C U I T.
And we had a dog when I was a child who could say “water”. She couldn’t quite get the consonants, but she had the vowels pretty well, and the intonation, and the syllables; and she only said it if she wanted water, not if she wanted food or to go out.
I had a Siamese cat that could say Water, too. He insisted that every time he was thirsty, someone come into the bathroom and get him a fresh dish of water. He would stand there and yell “wawa” when he wanted a drink. He also wanted to be walked down the stairs and would stand at the top crying until someone would come and walk down beside him. He didn’t want to be carried down, just wanted someone to walk with him.
StG
Once upon a time… while describing a child I would use loquacious.
We can’t say cookie within hearing of the dogs without them going crazy. So far, they don’t react when we say treat instead. This is really only an issue if one of us is checking with the other to make sure they don’t get too many snacks.
We say Ess Cue (S.Q.) instead of squirrel or else our dogs go nuts.
My mom says that when she was little, she knew both the word “candy” and the word “see ey en dee why”. And it wasn’t until much later that she understood how they were related.