Five-year-old Miss Fancy Pants and her mom came over today. MFP speaks pretty good English, her mom speaks almost none. MFP sent me into shock when she told me she knows a boy who ate dog sh**. I wasn't sure I heard right so I asked her what she meant. She said the boy ate "ice-cream-mint." Took me a minute to figure out she meant excrement. I don't think I knew that word when I was 5-years-old. I think she learned most of her English from her dad, which in her case turned out to be a dangerous thing. She has no clue that the first vocabulary word is a crude one.
Not five minutes earlier, I had received a message from a young Christian man who said "D*** it, I can't make it to the study tonight due to work responsibilities!" I don't think he knows that it is not really all that appropriate to use that phrase, especially in the context of the event he was discussing. He probably heard it on some American movie and thinks it is as pure and innocent as saying "doggone it."
Speaking a foreign language can be a tricky thing! I approach it with much fear and trembling myself.
No comments:
Post a Comment