Month: December 2009

I’m what they call a word person, preferring “viridian” to dreary green and never uttering “confused” when “flummoxed” is within reach.

An English major whose motif-musing and allusion-hunting skills have proved all but useless in the real world, I take admittedly odd delight in the careful craft of sentence-smithing.

One of my prized possessions is a tome titled “The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate,” and I fling myself from bed each morning to savor my Word of the Day e-mail from dictionary.com — a wellspring of toothsome terms like numinous, doff and foofaraw.

I challenge myself to use each new word in conversation before the week is over, and just never you mind whether I’m successful or not. The point is I want to.

That is why I find parenting to be a bit of a bore. As a mother, I estimate 87 percent of the sentences that spring from my mouth are vapid. Artless. In fact, they border on asinine. And most of them should go without saying:

“Stop hitting yourself.” “Get your jacket out of the peanut butter.” “No spitting in Mommy’s bed.” There’s the perennial, “You must use a tissue for that” and the all-too-frequent, “Well, would you like it if I called YOU an oogie bananahead?” I recently heard myself say, “We never ever lick the bottoms of our shoes.” And I wondered what the devil had become of my dexterity for discourse — let alone my children’s common sense.

There are things good parents don’t say to their children. We don’t, for example, say, “Somewhere in the high desert, there are gnomes building you a Wii” or “Did you know that antelope have invisibility powers?” We never tell them that a kindly old woman is likely to emerge from our tub drains in a blue suit at some point this month. And that we should leave her a dish of tiramisu.

Why, then, will we swear up and down that if our kids behave and eat their vegetables, a fat man in a red get-up will flit through the sky pulled by wingless horned mammals and squeeze down our filthy chimneys to bring us coveted baubles shrouded in Costco wrapping paper?

What the elf are we doing to our kids??

I make a big stink at home about honesty and how it’s our family’s highest value blah blah blah. Yet I’ve dragged my old Doc Martens through the fireplace and stomped them across the living room to leave convincing ash footprints on the carpet. I’ve nibbled from countless cookie platters intended for Santa, leaving big, obvious bite marks and telltale crumbs. I’ve affixed postage to “Dear Santa” letters that were ultimately mailed to no one, nowhere.

Was I wrong to do it?