# "Say dammit, Daddy," A Preschooler's Knows When To Swear **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [December 7, 2012, 12:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288 "2012-12-07T12:57:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Mama\_Zappa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/71e660/32.png) [@Mama\_Zappa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mama_Zappa)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2012, 2:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/21 "2012-12-11T02:07:48Z")
> [@TokyoBayer](#): > > I’m only sort of late getting our Christmas tree up. Considering all what’s happening, it’s not bad. > > I get the tree out of the box and start to put it together. And drop something. My four-year-old, Beta-chan, looks up and says “Say dammit, Daddy.” Except it’s “dannit” so I’m not quite sure what she means. I give her an enquiringly look and she says, “You dropped it, so say ‘dannit.’” > > Ah, yes. One must swear when one drops things. At least Grandma wasn’t there to overhear. :::snicker::: Back when **Dweezil** was a toddler, he was very good at picking up vocabulary and using it appropriately. So we were forced to make a very concerted effort to retrain ourselves. One day, I was carrying something upstairs, and it was precariously perched on a pile of other stuff I was carrying, and I sorta _knew_ it was doing to fall. When it did, I restrained myself and managed to keep it to “golly” or something like that. Dweezil, very helpfully, chimed in with “Gah Damit”. :smack::o ---
**Author:** ![Battle\_Pope](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Battle\_Pope](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Battle_Pope)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2012, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/22 "2012-12-11T02:09:10Z")
My wife & I tend to use different curse words, so we know who gets the blame when one of the boys repeats something. When mini-Pope #1 was about 2 1/2 he was sitting in the corner trying to put do a puzzle and, with ever mounting frustration, I heard “Dammit, bastard thing” - so that one was mine. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![furdmort](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e47774/32.png) [@furdmort](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furdmort)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2012, 10:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/23 "2012-12-11T10:55:49Z")
My wife is German (we life in Germany) and I am American. I speak English with the kids and she speaks German with the kids. It is always obvious where the kids get their cuss words… When our daughter was about three, my wife was asking her the names of various things in English. That is, my wife would ask (in German) my daughter to say the English word for some common things in the house. When they got to our cat, my wife says (in German) “And what is katze in English?” to which my daughter replied “Stupid hairball.” With a perfect american accent. 🆒😃 ---
**Author:** ![Mama\_Zappa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/71e660/32.png) [@Mama\_Zappa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mama_Zappa)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2012, 1:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/24 "2012-12-11T13:59:05Z")
> [@FatBaldGuy](#): > > My wife is fond of saying that she was 12 years old before she realized that her father’s first name was not “Dammit George.” Famous Bill Cosby routine - he thought his name was “Jeeeeee-zus Christ!” because every time his father saw him he’d yell that. “My brother Russell thought his name was Dammit!”. One day his father saw him, yelled “Dammit, get over here!”. “No dad, I’m Jesus Christ”. “I don’t remember much of the rest of that day”. ---
**Author:** ![Mona\_Lisa\_Simpson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ce7236/32.png) [@Mona\_Lisa\_Simpson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mona_Lisa_Simpson)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2012, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/25 "2012-12-11T15:15:24Z")
Since we moved to Vancouver this last year we have become consumers of public transportation. My son wanted to pull the bell on the bus, so I told him I would tell him when we could ring the bell. A block and a half from our stop I said “Ding it” M looks at me. “Ding it!” Another stare, and a glancing around. “Ding the bell!” “Oh. I Didnt know you meant for me to pull the cord! I thought you were pretend swearing!” :dubious: 😃 :smack: “Ding it!” has now entered our family lexicon. ---
**Author:** ![Soylent\_Juicy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/82dd89/32.png) [@Soylent\_Juicy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Soylent_Juicy)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2012, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/26 "2012-12-11T16:05:41Z")
When my friend’s daughter was about 3 she asked for some milk. Friend: “Sorry, honey, we’re out of milk - would you like some juice instead?” Friend’s kid: “For fuck’s sake.” Friend: “WHAT did you say?!!” Friend’s kid, in that adorable little-girl voice: “I say fuck’s sake?” Friend: “No, no you do not say that…” ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2012, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/27 "2012-12-12T19:10:03Z")
> [@Yllaria](#): > > There’s a story claiming that a friend of a friend’s kid was five before he figured out that the think that Mommy used a lot was really called a sewing machine and not whore. I’m not sure I follow the etymology. > [@Eureka](#): > > Same friend’s younger son figured out the perfect cussword–Jackhole. You see, you take the front half of jackass and add it to the back half of asshole, and there are no actual cusswords, so you won’t get in trouble for saying it. I kinda got annoyed with that commercial about the drill sargeant therapist who calls his patient a “jackwagon”. It’s one of those words that sounds kinda like a dirty word but isn’t really anything. But my nephew picked it up, probably because his father found that commercial funny. So he’d go around repeating that line from the commercial. _sigh_ Not horrible, just tiring. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2012, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/28 "2012-12-12T19:19:26Z")
> [@Irishman](#): > > I’m not sure I follow the etymology. I assumed that’s what she shouted at the sewing machine. If not, I’m not getting it either. ---
**Author:** ![gnoitall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bb73d2/32.png) [@gnoitall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnoitall)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2012, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/29 "2012-12-12T21:37:58Z")
The joys of parenthood. I was shocked, appalled, and thrilled to hear my then-two-year-old son sigh, shake his head, and mutter “Shit…” when he made a mistake (in his opinion) coloring his coloring book. Idiomatic, semantically-correct use of a conditional interjection? At the age of two! What a kid! (On reflection, it turns out that this particular style of swearing is more his mother’s… particularly the sigh and head-shaking.) 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Yllaria](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yllaria/32/3452_2.png) [@Yllaria](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yllaria)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2012, 11:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/30 "2012-12-12T23:01:19Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > I assumed that’s what she shouted at the sewing machine. If not, I’m not getting it either. Probably with a you in front of it: “You whore!” Mommy was into medieval costuming. Regular sewing machines aren’t really made to handle some costuming needs. ---
**Author:** ![Toxgoddess](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f08c70/32.png) [@Toxgoddess](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Toxgoddess)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2012, 2:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/31 "2012-12-13T02:28:32Z")
My darling three-year-old daughter, playing with her Fisher Price cars on the living room floor. Talking to herself, pretending to be the drivers, “Go, you asshole. Get going, you moron.” Daddy worked nights then, and he tended to be an impatient driver when there were other cars on the road. ---
**Author:** ![Yoyodyne\_Propulsion\_Systems](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/82dd89/32.png) [@Yoyodyne\_Propulsion\_Systems](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yoyodyne_Propulsion_Systems)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2012, 12:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/32 "2012-12-13T12:12:24Z")
My neighbors some years back had their four year old in Sunday school at a Southern Baptist church, she got up mid class to go to the drinking fountain, teacher asked where she was headed. The reply was “going out back for a smoke and a beer” Hello parent teacher conference… ---
**Author:** ![DirkGntly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d9b06d/32.png) [@DirkGntly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DirkGntly)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2012, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/33 "2012-12-13T15:53:59Z")
My son, at age three, when asked by his mother where I was, replied, “He’s on the damn couch.” Perfect inflection, and everything. I didn’t stay on the couch long after that… My daughter, when she was in 2nd grade at a parochial school, was called in for saying, “Move your butt out of my way.” We were called in, too. They told us they would prefer that she didn’t use the word, “butt.” I said, “Well, it’s a shortened form of the proper word, ‘buttocks’ - would you prefer she’d used a vulgarity like, ‘ass’ instead?” The looks on their faces were priceless. ---
**Author:** ![ekedolphin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ekedolphin/32/10003_2.png) [@ekedolphin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ekedolphin)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2012, 6:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/34 "2012-12-13T18:25:11Z")
Thanks to the bad influence of a couple of my friends, I went from not swearing at all to being quite vulgar in a very short span of time, culminating with the time when one of those said friends screwed me over and I left a profanity-filled “fuck off” message on his answering machine. His mother called my uncle, who was babysitting me at the time, and replayed the entire message for him. Oops. I was much older than preschool, though. Say, age ten or so. ---
**Author:** ![the\_Lady](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bb73d2/32.png) [@the\_Lady](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/the_Lady)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2012, 8:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/35 "2012-12-13T20:42:12Z")
I have a three year old who quite often whips out the “Jesus Christ!” when something doesn’t go his way - though his father has tried to limit the damage somewhat by insisting it’s “cheese and rice!” And one of the teachers at daycare was furious with my two year old, darling girl who would say “whatever” with exactly the right intonation, in exactly the right circumstances. What was even funnier was when the teacher “tattled” to the head of the daycare (seriously, who does that?) the head was like “oh yeah - she’s been doing that since she was 15 months old” Snicker. Bad Daddy. ---
**Author:** ![cher3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/da6949/32.png) [@cher3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cher3)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2012, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/36 "2012-12-13T20:52:41Z")
> [@the\_Lady](#): > > I have a three year old who quite often whips out the “Jesus Christ!” when something doesn’t go his way - though his father has tried to limit the damage somewhat by insisting it’s “cheese and rice!” When my daughter was about a year and a half old she had a babysitter who was an older, overweight, and somewhat arthritic Portuguese woman. Once, when my daughter plopped down on the floor to play with some toys at home, she gave a big sigh and said “Ay! Jesus!” with a perfect Portuguese accent. (Zhe-zoosh!) ---
**Author:** ![Big\_Fat\_Harry\_Deal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/f475e1/32.png) [@Big\_Fat\_Harry\_Deal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Big_Fat_Harry_Deal)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2012, 4:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/37 "2012-12-14T04:13:04Z")
Once when my niece was about three, she was showing me her little plastic people, and held up two of them together, exclaiming “look, the man kiss the other man’s ass!” She’d been listening to her dad way too much. ---
**Author:** ![sbunny8](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c77e96/32.png) [@sbunny8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sbunny8)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 12:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/38 "2012-12-15T00:07:35Z")
When I was in college, I was at a professor’s house and I tried to say something about a cute figurine “sitting on a shelf” but it came out of my mouth “shitting on itself”. His two young toddler daughters were standing right there and heard me say it. I decided to pretend the whole thing never happened. ---
**Author:** ![Noodles\_Fellicini](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/e36b37/32.png) [@Noodles\_Fellicini](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Noodles_Fellicini)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2012, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/39 "2012-12-15T01:36:57Z")
My niece (let’s call her) Laurie, at approximately four years of age, was an adorable little child with red ringlets and a dimpled grin. Her equally adorable sister (um) Shelly, was a year younger, and the family had two new dachshund puppies. Things were a little hectic as my sister was wrangling with bath time. Both kids had been taken out of the tub and dried off, but then Shelly had a little “accident”. One of the puppies running around the bathroom had also had an “accident” and it finally got to be a bit much for my sister. She was kneeling, tending to Shelly, and quietly began to cry. Laurie patted her on the back and said, ever so solicitously, “That’s okay Momma, you’re having a bad fuckin’ day.” ---
**Author:** ![SandyHook](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/dec6dc/32.png) [@SandyHook](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SandyHook)\ **Post date:** [December 17, 2012, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288/40 "2012-12-17T19:55:24Z")
About thirty years ago I was at a friend’s house. His two year old daughter looked out the window to see Ms Hook parking my truck out front. She pointed and informed her father, “SandyHook’s fuck.” My friend, who’s only been known to use damn, or bullshit a couple of times in the thirty-five years I’ve know him, was a little embarrassed and quickly informed me that they were working on her t’s. I pointed out that she could have been pointing at Ms Hook. My friend, who’s always been extremely supportive of his children, jumped on that and said, “Good, Ann, that’s very good.” [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/say-dammit-daddy-a-preschoolers-knows-when-to-swear/643288.md?page=3)