I was reading my friend Liz's blog yesterday. She wrote about how her daughter's teacher told her daughter that "poop" is a bad word, causing Liz and her partner to abandon their poop jokes.

I, lover of the English language, consider no words to be bad. Just sometimes inappropriately used.

I will not be winning any parenting awards when I say that I have a sailor's mouth, sometimes even around my daughter. I don't set out to say "fuck," it just occasionally happens. Still, it does make me somehow proud that she chastises me on my use of the word "stupid" but lets "fuck" sail right on by. Also, she never uses any of the Big Seven herself. We told her a while ago there are certain words that really sound horrible coming out of a child's mouth, and she must be old enough to drive in order to use them. Because only then can they truly be used properly.

This "stupid" thing, though -- I'm going through what Liz is going through with "poop." I've resulted to consulting The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate, which I keep sitting on my desk at work to frighten off IT people. Bring it on, kindergarten teacher.

Synonyms for "stupid" include:

• Asinine*
• Blockish
• Doltish
• Fatuitous
• Fatuous
• Witless

*One of my all-time favorite put-downs, because people can't tell if you've just called them an ass in polite company or not.

"Poop" alternatives:

• Feces
• Defecation
• Stercoraceous, stercorus (pertaining to feces)
• fecaloid (resembling feces)
• Feculent (fecal matter, full of) = WINNER, WINNER, CHICKEN DINNER!

So thank you, teachers of America, for forcing us parents to elevate our grammar to say the exact same thing in a way our kids don't understand.