Out of the Mouths of Babes: Cursing for Three-Year-Olds

While scanning the local Salvation Army store yesterday I came across a wonderful, hardback coffee table book on extinct animals full of beautiful botanical-style drawings of obsolete species (for a dollar!). The cover image brought back an old, deep, early memory for me.

When my sister, Katie, and I were very, very small, we would occasionally have some clash that would find one or both of us fuming, red-faced with anger and just plain spitting mad. In our fledgling innocence we would wrack our shiny new brains for the most scathing words we could think of, find almost a pitcher's stance for the presentation of them, and then wind up to deliver our ultimate explitive, the very WORST thing we could think of to call each other: "You, you, you... DODO BIRD!"

Illustration from A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World's Extinct Animals by Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten