OH great and powerful denizens of the hive mind; I come to you for assistance!
Celtling has a new caretaker at her Dad’s house, who uses the name “Jesus” to express all manner of emotion from gratitude to frustration and even contempt. Celtling has picked up this tendency over the past few weeks.
While I’m not a believer that copying this behavior will injure her immortal soul, I would nonetheless like to nip this in the bud if possible. We had some fun in the car the other morning trying to come up with funny replacements, but none were so compelling as to motivate her to adopt them.
It’s rather a fun exercise, and even more fun if you try to remember where you got them from.
We thought of:
Bilge! or the more emphatic Bilgewater!! (Thank you Colonel Potter)
Cheezits! (Recently stolen from Cecil himself)
Christopher Columbus! (Little Women)
Blast and botheration! (Winnie the Pooh)
And a few Celtling originals:
Squirrel scat!
Frog feces!
Pansy poo!
Mongoose muck!
(Why yes, she is in second grade, how did you know? LOL!)
My stepson was playing Call of Duty (badly) one day and was getting quite vocal in venting his frustration. His mother stepped in and told him he needed to stop playing if he couldn’t keep his language in check. The next explitive we heard was: Fudge a duckie in the pino!We have appropriated the phrase, and modified it to great comeic effect: (profanity follows)Fudge a goddam duckie in it’s motherfucking pino!We have since adopted a baby duck. It’s name is Fudge.
For a while after my brother and I read Stephen King’s The Stand, Flagg was our euphemistic curse word of choice. (As in Randall Flagg, the manifestation of evil.)
It was just close enough to that other F word, while still being obviously different, and other Stephen King nerds got the reference.
Second grade is a little too young to appreciate Stephen King, I suppose, but maybe she’ll grow into it?
When my son was little, I adopted the old Morkism, Shazzbat. It has no real meaning, so can’t be offensive, and it’s kind of fun to say as an expletive.
Truth be told, I still use it when I’m in unfamiliar company, to avoid possible offense.
Has she read The Illuminated Adventures of Flora and Ulysses? It’s a wonderful Newbery-award-winning book by Kate Di Camillio and well worth reading. The epithet of choice in it is Holy Bagumba!, and my daughter loves to shout it.
I’m fond of Jellybeans, Jehosephat, or my 2nd favorite, Jiminy Cricket.
I’m fondest of the traditional JFHC on a popsicle stick, but my mom hates when I do that, which is a lot, even around her sensitive ears. So did the people at work, now that I think of it.
Maybe she, and I, could just say popsicle stick?
