Suth'n humor

One of my all-time favorite jokes is bilingual, involving English and French.

"Why do the French like to eat just one egg for breakfast?"

Give up?

--Because "one egg" is "un oeuf" (enough).

Driving E and D home from school this afternoon, I was treated to my very first bilingual joke involving English and Suth'n. Interestingly, like the English/French joke, the English/Suth'n joke also involves numbers and food. D read out loud from the student newpaper:

"Why is it dangerous to do math in the jungle?"

Ready?

--Because when you add four plus four, you get eight.
The kids said, "I don't get it." D had to read the punchline aloud a few more times before she and E burst out laughing. To their credit, they understand that around here, you're more likely to get et or eaten than to get ate, but as with un oeuf/enough, we allow precise pronunciations to slide for the pleasure of the bilingual riddle.

What I like best about the joke, in addition to what it presumes about readers' fluency in American regional dialects, is its easy-going insertion of Southerners into far-off exotic jungles in order to get them et. Surely sharks, alligators, and a myriad of urban predators resent arithmetic as much as their subtropical kin.

The G-word

As I was carpooling E and D to school this morning, E asked from the back seat, "Mama, is 'God' a bad word?"

"'God'? No, 'God' isn't a bad word," I said. "In fact, 'God' is usually a good word. But some people think it's disrespectful to use the word 'God' in certain ways."

"Yeah," chimed in D: "you shouldn't take the Lord's name in vain."

E and D have both heard kids at school chew one another out for doing that. Indeed, I was volunteering in E's classroom a couple years ago when I was privy to such a conversation between two first-graders who were working together at a small table. It went more or less like this:

Girl (shaking her head at some ridiculousness): "Oh God."
Boy (appalled): "You take that back!"
Girl: "What?"
Boy: "You said God."
Girl (realizing both that she's busted and that she's found the right button to push): "No."
Boy: "You're taking the Lord's name in vain! Take it back!"
Girl: "No. I can say 'God' if I want."
Boy: "You take it back!"
Girl: "God God God God God God God God!"
Boy: "You shut up now, you %#*!!@, or I'm gonna get my brother to whip your butt!"

Anyway, back to this morning's conversation, I said, "that's right. So 'God' is a good word that people sometimes use badly, but it isn't a 'bad word' like some other things people say that I'm not going to say in the car right now."

"Oh!" said E brightly, "like the F-word, the A-word, the S-word, and the C-word?"

"Whoa, you know all those words?!"

"Yup," said E and D simultaneously, proud of their scandalous, alphabet-defined playground vocabulary. Then E, ever honest, confessed, "Actually, I don't know what the C-word is..." (D: "Me neither.") "...Or the D-word...Or the E-word..."

Four letters down, twenty-two left to go. Maybe after a few more years of schooling, they'll be able to tell me what the Z-word is.