I was born at a very young age.

 Good morning,

I pray the day finds you well.

Words are important, I learned this at a young age. 

Here is a riddle for you, "How does an English teacher who is fluent in French and Latin marry a truck driver?"  

Answer, "They meet in the sixth grade, date all through Highschool, she goes off to college, he goes off to the Coast Guard, he comes home after and they get married.  

After a few years of marriage, and after they had my older sister, they decided to have me.

I was born at a very young age.

As I grew, they taught to walk and to talk; that took every bit of the first two years, after that they spent most of their time telling me to sit down and shut up.

I ended up spending a lot of time listening, mostly to my mother and my father. 

My mother would speak in high English using big words along with French and Latin. 

My father used other words to get his point across.

One day I was outside working with my dad, I must have been 3-4 years old, and I got mad. I used one of my dad's favorite words that he would use to get the point across that he was mad. 

Dad just looked at me and said, "I don't care if you say that word, everybody says that one. But, if I ever catch you saying pantyhose, garbage can, or pediatrician. I will turn your butt red!"

I had no idea that garbage can was a bad word and I didn't even know what pantyhose or pediatrician was, so I would walk around muttering under my breath, "Garbage can, pantyhose, pediatrician!"

My mother was a bit more creative, after all her vocabulary was a bit bigger. Dad would say, "Ok kids, it is time for us all to go outside. I don't know what your mother just said, but I can tell she is mad!"

Mom liked to make up words when she couldn't think of the name of something; such as calling corner shelving a "boomprasa" a word that came back to bite my little sister when she was old enough to buy her own furniture.

I was telling this to Frederick the Great the other day, and he said, "I have the perfect joke for you."

It is called, A 4 year old's first paycheck. It goes like this.

A young family moved into a house, next to a vacant lot. One day, a construction crew turned up to start building a house on the empty lot.

The young family's 4-year-old daughter naturally took an interest in all the activity going on next door and spent much of each day observing the workers.

Eventually, the construction crew, all of them "gems-in-the-rough," more or less adopted her as a kind of project mascot.

They chatted with her; let her sit with them, while they had coffee and lunch breaks and gave her 20 little jobs to do here and there to make her feel important. At the end of the first week, they even presented her with a pay envelope containing ten dollars.

The little girl took this home to her mother, who suggested that she take her 10 dollars "pay" she had received to the bank the next day to start a savings account. 

When the girl and her mom got to the bank, the teller was equally as impressed and asked the little girl how she had come by her very own paycheck at such a young age. The little girl proudly replied, "I worked last week with a real construction crew, building the new house next to us."

"Oh my goodness gracious," said the teller, "and will you be working on the house again this week, too?"

The little girl replied, " I will, if those Bleepity-bleeps at Home Depot ever deliver the Bleepity-bleep drywall!"

When Frederick told me that joke, and after I had finished running around the table with my scissors, 

 I said, "That reminds me of my neighbor Ralph (Not his real name but every story goes better with a name attached). In Kansas your nieghbor lived 1.5 miles away. 

Ralph was a wonderful man who not only talked to himself. but he answered himself too. He also used what my mother called "colorful" language. 

I used to go help Ralph on his farm a lot and I would come home talking as Ralph had modeled. My mother told me I couldn't work at Ralph's anymore. Later, when my grandfather came to live with us, he would help Ralph. Mom put the kabosh on him helping Ralph after he too came home mimicking Ralph. 

Words are important. 

When we speak, people listen. 

A wise person gets known for insight; gracious words add to one's reputation. (Psalm 16:21)

We must be present to ourselves as well as others and, as we like to say in the guild, "Know our audience." or in the words of Padme, "Age appropriate curriculum." Using the right words for the right thing will do many wonderous things; one of which is not getting beaten up in the lunch line for calling a bigger kid a pediatrician, just say-in.  

Something to ponder.

Blessings,

Roger