Regarding the Booty . . .

“Booty” has an interesting history in my life. It wasn’t a slang term for me until my senior year in high school. My parents moved us from Salt Lake City Utah to Detroit Michigan. In my new high school, the word booty was rampant.

There were several meanings to the word.

There was the sexual context, as in: “Gotta get me some booty tonight.”
The pirate context: “Get offa me booty, ye scalywag!”
The anatomical context: “Look at the booty on that!”
Or to represent the whole body: “Woa, that dude got his booty kicked big time.”

We mainly used last two contexts for the word. I was most likely the one that brought it into our home. The kids all thought it was hilarious. “Don’t make me kick your booty!” or “Your booty stinks.” were common usages. My parents frowned at the word at first, then once they understood it was relatively harmless and that it wasn’t going away, they grudgingly accepted it. My mom will still to this day even use the word, though I can’t recall my dad ever uttering it.

Even though my loquacious nature caused me to move on to other terms such as patootie, or (thanks to MST3K) Hinder, or simply “A”, the word never left our family lexicon. I even gave my younger brother the nickname “Booty” because of his lack of one. in Fact we joked that he had more of a dimple than a booty.

Well, now I am married with four kids and they have chosed to take booty into their own limited vocabularies. Again, this is my fault because I probably threatened to spank their booties a time or two.

Well what spawned this article is that my three year old has recently decided that booty is his favorite word. Every thing is booty. Booty rules all. He falls down on purpose just so that he can say “Ow, my booty!” He even adds potty talk into it while taunting his older siblings. “Hah! you poop on you booty!”, “You pee you booty!”, or “Hah ha, you poo booty stink booty smelly pee booty!”

Mrs. Edge looks at me dumbfounded as I can’t help but laugh despite myself. I know it’s my fault. I brought booty into this new generation. It amuses me. Am I a bad person?