Over at Dooce -- Technorati top ten Queen of the Mummy Bloggers -- they've been discussing appropriate language for describing what used to be known as one's private parts.
The whole thing got Tearfree thinking once again about something that's been bugging her for a very long time. Why teach two-year-old girls to call their urinary tract a vagina? These kids absolutely don't need to know either the word or the organ since they have zero use for it at that age. What they need to know for the purpose of day-to-day living is what to call the stuff they use.
Although Tearfree's daycare advocated vulva for girls (beter than vagina but still problematic) and penis for boys, Tearfree was never happy with either of those choices. Vagina, as explained above, is just wrong while penis is an ugly word, which most right thinking men tend to avoid anyway. Like Denzel Washington in Inside Man, they come up with creative nicknames, in his case, "Big Willy and the twins."
In the Tearfree household, we eventually settled on peepee maker, which Tearfree agrees is a little too baby talk, but has the virtue of being accurate if nothing else.
4 comments:
When my daughter was a toddler, we called it her "petunia." I don't know whether that is charming or disturbed. She used the real word once she got older and realized her friends used the real world.
Petunia's very feminist. Flowering, blooming, all that. Excellent choice.
Very Georgia O'Keeffe!
Where's Granny? She would totally know about all this stuff!!
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