As Jeremy and Faelan and I were riding in the car one day in mid-August, Faelan started using "Jesus" as a swear word: "Bad! Bad! Jesus! Bad!"
He had learned that from a woman on the playground who said it when he fell off the fire pole. Her son had started to say it after she did, and she yelled at him for it, without even seeming to realize that she'd just said it herself.
Anyway, when I told him he shouldn't use God's name that way, he wanted to know why, and I said something about God telling us not to. He said, "God is just in imagination, he can't talk to us." I said that he was real, and that he left us instructions in the Bible.
Faelan said, what about that woman with the baby, and I asked, "who, Mary?" and he said "Yes! Mary! Mary! Bad!" So then I had to explain why he shouldn't use her name as a swear word.
He wanted to know if she left us instructions not to. "No," I said, "she wasn't God, so she didn't give us instructions. She gave her own children instructions." He wanted to know why, and I tried to explain that that was her job as a mother.
He thought for a minute, and then he asked, "who was the father?" Like a goof, I said, "you mean Joseph?" And he said, "Joseph! Joseph! Bad!" at which point Jeremy and I cracked up.
I'd never heard anyone use those names as swear words separately before. How long did it take the Irish to combine them? It sure didn't take Faelan long to go from one to all three. Happily, he has not done it again.
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