Thank you

[ailbhe]

to kightp for her potato curry recipe, which Rob has grown so friendly with that he can whip up a double-sized batch of a variant of it without pre-planning when we're too tired to cook during the week. We've had two or three meals of it and there's a container in the freezer for next time we're knackered.

And we're eating it with real bread and for dessert we're having preserved fruit - I have apricots and the others have peaches, because the apricots aren't sweet enough for them.

Linnea has picked up the habit of saying "pudding" to mean the non-savoury course at the end of the meal. I find this irritating because neither Rob nor I say it; we use "pudding" to mean a type of food. We say "dessert" (well, sometimes I might say "afters," but usually "dessert," and I'd rather not examine the complicated class issues which go into my saying "afters.") and I have a feeling I know where she picked the new word up from and I'm not happy about her learning language usage from people who say "silly" for "naughty." I happen to like silly.

Of course, it could be from somewhere else entirely, in which case I can stop worrying.

But why stop now?

Comments

[helenprev.livejournal.com]

We as a family now call afters 'nelse', fairly often, because when Freya was little we used to say 'shall we have something else?' when it was time to have the sweet part of the meal. After a while of this, she would finish her main course and shout 'nelse! nelse!'

I do call it pudding, and am not ashamed of that, but I am ashamed to say that I say 'that was a silly thing to do, wasn't it?' far too often, and reading your post has made me reconsider that word. I don't much like the word naughty either though... must think on that one!

[rmc28]

I got all angsty at Christmas about the family saying "Good boy!" to my 15-month-old son for doing what they wanted, and pushed hard for "Well done!" or "thank you!" or "that's it!" The point being, was he therefore a "bad boy!" when he didn't manage to jump through their hoops, or didn't want to play any more?

I feel like chanting "the behaviour, not the person, the behaviour, not the person" some days.

I got told I probably think about this sort of thing too much (and that's a whole other rant), but they did at least try.

[ailbhe]

I say "good girl" but not "bad girl." I'm not sure how often I say "good girl," compared to "well done" or "wasn't that great," or "how strong!" or whatever. I think it's mainly in the tone.

For me and my family. Other families' tones can and do vary; I've heard "good girl" used to mean "and not like the bad girl over there to whom I am passive-aggressively comparing you."

[ailbhe]

I think I mostly say "That wasn't a good thing to do," but I do use the word "naughty" because it took so much effort to introduce it into my vocabulary at all! I ought to be saying "bold."

"Pudding" would be fine if it came from a source I was more comfortable with, but I suspect it comes from a source which actually believes that people who do/don't say "pudding" are/represent, er, something or other. Us/them, serviette/napkin, pardon/excuse me. Using the words in your own idiolect or dialect is fine, whether or not my daughter picks them up and adopts them as her own; telling my daughter that the words in her parents' idiolect/dialect are wrong, not so hot.