When you grow up in a particular environment, you tend to think of it as the default, but it ain’t necessarily so. Once you realize it doesn’t have to be, you can end up wondering what really is normal – especially if its a topic that people don’t discuss all that much.
One of my boys [ Sam ] developed the ability to curse before he could talk. He sounded a lot like Yosemite Sam: “That dirty perka shorka bat-flattin’ portin’ filabunkabertin’, perkalooma burtin’ dirtin’ boostinattin’ bartin’ anatom, oooooooh!”. He did it when he was really mad. I have no idea who might have set him such a bad example.
Do other toddlers do this?
West Hunter 
Could it be genes?
Why does Tourette’s syndrome seem to access this vocabulary first. Is the wiring closer .
I have 5 year old grandson that seems to swear a lot . Attention getting right now. Also have a 4 month old grandson who uses intonations of inquiry and humour before laughing. The speech patterns are way before the words . Anyone else notice this
I’m not a linguist, but I’ve heard that “ma/mama” for is ubiquitous for “mother” because bilabials are the first word-like sounds a baby makes, and their mothers think the baby is talking about them. Is this true?
You do a good eye-dialect for Yosemite Sam, BTW. There was another cartoon character of our era who spoke similarly. Not Mugsy, he was later. But “gravisational pompous frick-a-frack…” Yeah, the music of cursing without the lyrics. I do think those are separate items.
I recall a Chomsky-Lite discussion over a decade ago at Language Log which had a few linguists arguing that not one but at least three grammar discs are hard-wired into the human brain, but why one is expressed over the others is unclear. There are two standard SVO or SOV expressions, but sometimes, for obscure reasons, there is a VSO language which, to the toddlers “has a good beat and the kids could dance to it – I gave it a 95” quality. What you are describing is not the same thing, but I think it is a possible analog. You might bring your question there. They have knuckleheads there, but some really thoughtful people as well. You are well positioned to weed through crap.
“Yeah, the music of cursing without the lyrics.”
That would explain why there are so many euphemisms for curse words. You can use whatever words you want because it is the music that tells you what is being expressed. When someone says “Consarn it”, you know exactly what they mean even if you’ve never heard the word “consarn” before.
Same for sexual innuendo. When someone says, with the right intonation, “I see you’re putting a little VARNISH on the old CREDENZA there”, you get a pretty good idea of what’s on their mind.
The mapping of words to sexual meanings is many, many, many to a few.
Iirc, one of Mel Blanc’s go-tos was “brassa-frackin”
Not my daughter. Her first word was “Dad”, clear as a bell, much to my wife’s irritation.
My daughter’s first word was shit, I blame her mom for that, but when she moved on to “for fuck sake’s” I was proud she could mimic her old man. Kids are sponges and tend to go for high response phrases to get maximum attention. Oh and she used them in the correct context too, she’s a genius I tells ya.
Yes, pretty much. Mother in old Japanese was “papa”, incidentally. “mamma” means food.
My little one (girl – now grown up) would say the F-word with astonishing gusto and clarity well before she could say much else – and of course it was terribly funny which would only encourage her more – until she did it loudly in church, requiring an immediate re-assessment of the situation (though that too was – obviously – pretty funny as well.
Let me be clear: Sam cursed without words. it couldn’t be mistaken for anything else, but there were no English words in it. He also knew some tunes, about five, before he could talk.
Oh gotcha – literally like Yosemite Sam. No, have not see that.
Was he exposed to old Looney Tunes classics at all? Probably the most likely teacher would have been Yosemite Sam himself; second most likely, someone imitating him. Third most, someone injuring themselves and repressing the swearing around children.
According to my mom, my very first word was a Jamaican curse word. My mom said she knew this because my great grandmother summoned her quite emphatically when it happened…
Treat that as the usual based-on-a-true-story narrative for scientific purposes, but work it up as a routine, please. It is a story that could carry you through many social situations.
I’ve got a million of ’em.
There was the time that I convinced a girl that I’d given her anti-birth control pills.
Way ahead of you.
Weird. I’ve never of something like that before. That’s includes a fair number of toddlers: my own, others in the extended familiar, other parents.
Could he have heard that type speech on TV and adapted it to his lower toddler vocabulary?
Well, Sam has depths. A few months later he took a glass of water and poured it into his twin’s diaper.
That is not so odd, I would think. I have no experience with twins, so it’s for me harder to judge. But it doesn’t sound out of line.
My two were only 21 months apart. But the older (a boy) has a placid personality and didn’t show any jealousy when we brought his sister home. He never was jealous at any point.
However the girl, as soon she was old enough to be aware that she had a brother, started becoming jealous of him.
She has an assertive personality, yet I have never her at any age lose her temper and curse. From a young age she had an uncanny ability to sound like someone much older and more mature. (Needless to say, she has done very well in life. The placid boy, not so much.)
I wouldn’t worry about either the speech or the diaper incident (the latter just sounds a typical mischievous boy).
For the speech, your son might become one of those people who are really good at mimicking accents.
Pouring water into the little brother’s diaper…? That’s nothing. I was worried that the elder daughter would throw her baby sister through the window. Actually I caught her in the last minute. Birds do it, and tree-living anthropoids too.
Now that is worrying. It would depend on old she was. If she wasn’t old enough to understand the danger, that’s one thing…but if she was old enough, yikes!
Are they still young or have they grown up? A lot of toddler hijinx aren’t a big deal.
Grown up and loving each other. Among humans, there is no record of female siblings physically harming each other.
Good to hear. I was a bit worried.
“there is no record”
Not common, but of course there is.
http://www.livescience.com/27459-cleopatra-sister-discovery-controversy.html
“””Cleopatra saw her half-sister as a threat and had her murdered in 41 B.C.”””
Perhaps it was just echolalic babbling that reminded you of Yosemite Sam.
When you grow up in a particular environment, you tend to think of it as the default, but it ain’t necessarily so. Once you realize it doesn’t have to be, you can end up wondering what really is normal – especially if its a topic that people don’t discuss all that much.
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
No, not anything is possible. The universe follows natural laws. If it didn’t, if it were totally random, then biological life would not be possible.
More precisely, life does not exist where natural law does not appear to be. Whether the universe actually contains any net order is an open question and likely not determinable; it is necessarily the case that the part of it containing us does.
try talking as quick as possible. you will realize that you are cursing soon. Cursing is the most basic and easiest form of speech apperantly… no wonder kids do it…
Only unusual because it’s not common for someone to swear around a baby, but someone probably was swearing around him, and he correctly picked up on it being deployed in the context of expressing annoyance or frustration.
A related question is why can children make animal sounds before they can talk? Especially animals they have no first-hand contact with?
A child can answer the question, “what does the cow say?” (Moooo!) long before he can answer the question, “who says ‘Moooo!’?” (A cow.)
MAOA
My first words were my father’s common swear words.
common and very frequent.
Here’s something similar to Sam:
http://imgur.com/gallery/eAjQwtW
I found it fascinating to see a toddler construct her own vocabulary. We learned that “some Daddy running” meant a jogger.
https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/12/11/being-fluent-at-swearing-is-a-sign-of-healthy-verbal-ability/
I do most of my swearing in foreign languages. Thought my speech was well concealed. But here I am learning that swearing is identifiable, even when not in any known language. Hijo de la gran puche! Explains why the dean gave me a dirty look last week…
I used to work for a company where an oral instruction describing something as “forbidden” meant that management really would prefer that you didn’t do it. If they really insisted that you not do it, the expression used was “verboten”.
Toddlers babbling at length in some patter that sounds linguistic, with the exact intonation, attitude, and body language you’d expect from someone who was actually telling a story, making a complaint giving a speech (or whatever) is quite common. The specific Yosemite Sam routine is probably more about your toddler’s personality, and the kind of feelings he gets eloquent about.
My daughter is 8.5 and I’ve never heard her do that. Of course, my parents never heard me swear until I was 25, and it was hardly the first time for me.
Greg,
I have 7 children and my 6th (a 4 year old boy) drops the F-bomb about 100 times a day. It’s almost always in a stressful situation, usually when one of this older brothers teases or hits him. HIs favorites are “fucking” , “fucker”, and “fuck you.” I have tried sending him to his room (which he hates) and spanking him but nothing seems to stop him. My wife is convinced that my father has Tourette’s (he has a couple of really odd, involuntary motor tics) and that my 4 year old inherited it from him. My 4 year old also screams really loud sometimes when he’s mad and sometimes for no apparent reason. I swear he’s Sam Kinison reincarnated.