OPINION: Embarrassing words, kids and ivy

Feb. 3—All parents have funny stories about their children's misuse or pronunciation of words. My mother brings out such tales when they're most likely to elicit the same embarrassment that accompanies photos of babies with diapers puddled around their ankles, bare butts beaming.

"When you were little, you used to say, 'Little Miss Muffet, sat on her tuffet, eating her turds and whey,'" my mom has repeatedly said to anyone who would listen.

I had no idea what a "turd" was, but I wouldn't have recognized a curd, either. I'm sure I knew what the former was before I could define the latter. Only much later in life did I learn a "tuffet" is a sort of footstool or low seat, and that "whey" is the nasty yellowish liquid that you strain off to get Greek yogurt.

I had trouble with other nursery rhymes and traditional jingles as well. Until I was a teenager, I thought one well-known tune was sung with the following phonetical pronunciation: "Mare-zee-dotes and doe-zee-dotes and little lam-zee-divey. A kiddle-dee-divy too, wouldn't you?" I knew people who square-danced and watched "Hee Haw," so I vaguely intuited these words might have had something to do with do-si-dos or hoe-downs, but were more likely nonsensical phrases, kind of like, "Hot-diggity, dog-diggity, boom what you do to me." I was sorely disappointed when I finally understood the song goes like this: "Mares eat oats, and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy. A kid'll eat ivy, too, wouldn't you?" Not that this makes any more sense than the other version. I don't know about the rest of you, but I've never had a hankering for ivy.

Later on, I became rather smug about my superior grasp of the English language. My sister Lisa, who is two years younger than I, used to team up with me to provoke our younger sister into blurting words her tongue wasn't yet equipped to handle. She couldn't say, "U-Tote-Em," so every time we passed by the store in Fort Gibson, we'd point and say, "What's that?" She'd jubilantly yell, "EEEEE-cock-ee!" Of course, we'd snicker, and our horrified mom would tell us to shut up.

That's not as bad as the son of a friend of mine. He called baseballs "brassnuts," and for some reason, he labeled a horse's saddle a "sh*tleg."

My son used to call biscuits "skibbits," and when we went to Wal-Mart, he would ask for an "Eye-seat," rather than an "Icee." To this day, my husband and I use those labels, and we often get strange looks. Young children of Cole's acquaintance are exacting their revenge. Most of his youngest cousins called him "Cold" for years, and I'm given to understand that his girlfriend's nieces do the same.

The misuse or mispronunciation of words can be forgiven in children, but in adults, it's water-cooler cannon fodder. A former co-worker who got a harassing email was sure someone in the office sent it, so she dispatched a memo threatening to force everyone to take a "polygram." On another occasion, she told me she hadn't eaten all day, and "When I got home last night, I was just ravished!" Another time, she overheard Teddye Snell and me discussing cuisine, and one of us used the phrase "amuse bouche." She scowled and said, "I don't find George Bush the least bit funny."

Most locals know Former Press Publisher Brad Sugg died of a brain tumor several years ago. When the tumor was discovered, he had surgery almost immediately, and he described it in an email: "I'm getting my head chopped open tomorrow." The tone was so flippant and blunt (even for Brad) that Eddie Glenn, who worked here at the time, thought the email was from an imposter. Brad returned to work afterward, but his speech was affected. He struggled every time the topic of our sister paper, the Muskogee Phoenix, came up, because he could no longer pronounce the "F," so it always came out "Muskogee Penix" — though he wasn't much good with the "X," either. Everyone thought it was hilarious, especially Brad.

I like to correct people (I'm an editor, after all), but I'm trying to get over it. My feathers get ruffled every time someone says he or she is "honing in" on something — a target, a good grade, a new job, whatever. "So you're gonna sharpen it to a point? Improve its skills?" I always ask, irritated, before explaining the phrase they're looking for is "home in."

It's not worth losing sleep over — although I can remember a time my brother caused a lot of lost sleep among my parents, aunts and uncles. One of them introduced us to this ditty where you substitute names: "Kim, Kim, Bo-Bim, Banana-Fanna-Foe-Fim, Me My Mo Mim, Kim!" My brother went around and sang it using everyone's respective names: my aunts Lois, Pauletta, Shirley, and a few cousins. The trouble began when he got to Uncle Chuck. ...