WHAT did You Say?!

I’ll never forget sitting on the side of the tub, with a bar of Ivory soap in my mouth, facing my mother as she sat on the closed toilet seat. She was giving me a “talking to”. That’s what she called lecturing. I was about eight or so and I had told my sister to go to, um….let’s call it the place where the devil resides. Why? Because I thought she was trying to cut my fingers off with a shovel. You see, we were attempting to dig a swimming pool in our backyard and she was digging with the shovel while I was removing the dirt, and we had a near miss.

I hadn’t yet heard the story of my father, at age three, after working furiously trying to hook his overalls, let his frustration slip with a serious “bad word.” He called his overalls “the offspring of a female dog.” Well, he heard grandpa say stuff like that and it seemed like something that those overalls deserved. The disappointing thing for his parents is that it happened in front of a visiting preacher. Or so the story goes.

As Christian parents, we never would have thought about cussing in front of our children, as those words of our drug-infested youth were a thing of the past. No, as young parents, we were very careful of the vocabulary we wanted our children to use.

We didn’t use the “S” words. That would be “shut up” or “stupid.” We didn’t use, therefore our children didn’t use, minced oaths. “Heck is where you go if you don’t believe in Gosh” is a good picture of what minced oaths are. We would cringe when people would use words like that around our children. They were probably thinking that they were giving our children “word tools” commonly seen as a cleaned up version of what the world says. We also didn’t use potty language, meaning those awful words to describe waste or flatulence. We chose the words we wanted our children to say by using them ourselves. We used the timeless #1 and #2 and our family called those uncomfortable bouts of gas “tooting” instead of the other word.

I'm glad our choices were made before we gave birth and good thing too. We soon recognized that our children were building up vocabulary at lightning fast speed. Our firstborn started speaking with words at 10 months, sentences at 14 months and before he turned two would say things like, “My room is a disaster.” When he turned six, he mentioned that his younger brother had made him angry. Although the way it came out was, “I am wroth with my brother.” As a family, we don’t speak in Old English; all it took was possibly a Grimm’s fairy tale to teach him this descriptive term. Or maybe it was the King James Bible tapes he listened to. Both used that term. How thankful we were that he didn’t learn to speak the way the world speaks or he probably would have used a word for “urine.”

How sensitive we need to be as parents about the language we use. As Christians, we may not be using blatant cuss words, but is our language uncouth, harsh, full of minced oaths or potty language? Do we talk like the Word or the World? I think we ought to give serious thought to Christ’s words in Matt. 12:36 “But I say to you that for every idle word men may speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment.” Let’s teach our young children to speak in beautiful, innocent terms and carefully consider the "word tools" we are giving them.