Dear Prudence: I taught my niece a sex-word. Whoops.

[cereta]

Dear Prudence,
My sister won’t speak to me because I taught her daughter a naughty word. I was playing Scrabble with my 8-year-old niece, who is very smart. She always kills me when we play and it’s kind of embarrassing for me. But this one game was close. I had the opportunity to play all my letters to spell “fellatio” ensuring I’d win the game. I thought a bit about whether I should play this word or just lose graciously. Pride got the better of me and I played the word. My niece didn’t believe it was a word and looked it up in the dictionary. This lead to numerous questions about sex that I wasn’t prepared for. So I told her to ask her mother. When my sister found out what I’d done she hit the ceiling. She was furious at me that I’d taught her this word. Now she won’t speak with me. I’ve considered apologizing but I don’t think I did anything wrong. She would have learned the word eventually anyway. When I was a kid, I learned far worse words younger than that.

Bud! Fellatio is only 11 points in Scrabble! Even with the 50-point bonus for using all of your tiles, this was the wrong hill to die on. It is a bad idea to teach your 8-year-old niece about blow jobs, no matter how much you thought you knew about oral sex when you were a kid. (For everyone who doesn’t believe Scrabble can lead to a situation like this: Play with my family sometime.) I admire your commitment to winning and share your salt-the-earth strategy when it comes to gamesmanship, but you should know better. Apologize to your sister, and don’t play Scrabble with your niece again.

Comments

[liv]

This is a tough one for me. I agree, the LW shouldn't have done something they knew was problematic just to beat a little kid at Scrabble. And yes, there's a difference between deliberately losing just because your opponent is a child, and going all out to win no matter what when there's such a big age gap.

At the same time, I'm generally morally opposed to censoring children's vocabulary, and I don't consider (especially formal) words for sex acts to be "naughty" words. I generally think that if a child is old enough to look up words in the dictionary and interested enough to ask pertinent questions rather than just going, oh, boring grown-up sex stuff, then they're old enough to learn the definition of fellatio. I do respect that some parents might feel differently, though, and it's not like LW was blindsided by their sister objecting to her 8yo learning this stuff. So I lean towards the view that LW should have lost the game rather than playing the word, and I definitely agree that now it's happened LW should apologize.

[cereta]

At the same time, I'm generally morally opposed to censoring children's vocabulary, and I don't consider (especially formal) words for sex acts to be "naughty" words.

I've been struggling with that, too, and I think for me it comes down to...gah, I don't know how to put this without sounding sex-negative. My kid asks a lot of questions, but she's still pretty much, "...eewww" and often a little embarrassed and uncomfortable about the whole thing. She wants to know, but I don't think she's ready to just have it come up in a game of Go Fish, you know? It's not going to traumatize her or anything, and as long as the adult kept playing Go Fish (she could play cards for HOURS), she'd move on, but I would still side-eye an adult other than me or her father who intentionally brought oral sex into a conversation that had previously been about the merits of Wonder Woman v. Supergirl. Something about the context in this situation just makes me roll my eyes at the LW and say, "Oh, come ON."

[liv]

Thanks, this does help to clarify my thoughts. If something to do with sex just happens to come up in conversation in front of a kid, it's a lot easier for the kid to work out the general concept from context, and also easier for the adults to add anything needful, and age-appropriate, to the explanation, because they can relate it to the conversation where the word showed up. But using a word just out of the blue as in a Scrabble board, and certainly doing so intentionally (as opposed to, say, momentarily forgetting that the word might have a sexual connotation), is a lot more of a problem. And it's a really good point that the child, as well as her mother, may have been embarrassed, which makes it more unfair to play the word just for the sake of a winning Scrabble score.

[elialshadowpine]

I'd say it in part depends on family. My family was pretty serious about word games, but they've got nothin' on my fiancee's family, who play Scrabble like it was an Olympic sport. Those people are scary in their Scrabble devotion, and kids are expected to keep up. That said, I doubt they're the types to use "naughty" (to quote the LW) language.

My family, however, was a completely toss-up on who could dive deepest into the gutter. I remember more than one occasion playing Hangman or something during a road trip where the conversation went as such. Actually, there's two variants.

Variant 1:

Mom: "Where in the world did you learn that word?"

Me + Sister in unison: "Dad."

Mom: *now glaring daggers at father*

Variant 2:

Mom: "Where in the world did you learn that word?"

Me: "From a book."

Mom: "What book?"

Me: *names book Mom had recommended the previous week*

Mom: "........ IT HAS THOSE WORDS IN THERE!?!?"

Me: "Uh-huh. Did you forget to check again?"

My family, ladies and gentlefolks.

That being said, the LW's family sounds a bit more, uhm... conventional, yeah, let's go with that... than either my family or my fiancee's. Oy.