"Pussy" is a funny word because its taboo or profane meaning is slang and not definitive. Its beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A simpleton would say that since London knows neither the profane meaning nor the feline meaning of the word, anyone who thinks he's uttering an obscenity is perverse -- but hearing "pussy" out of context and out of a young boy's mouth, most people cannot help being offended, intrigued or both.

My older brother and his wife recently split up, and my sister-in-law is quite wounded from the separation and impending divorce. I phoned her to offer my ear and, as is habit in my family, put my daughter on first to say hello and tell her aunt about her busy suburban life of spelling, tap dance and horseback riding. She then passed the telephone to her younger brother, who shouted enthusiastically into the receiver: "Hey, you big pussy!"

I snatched the phone away, sending him into hysterics, and prepared to start the long explanation about "the word" and our fruitless investigation of its origin and subsequent embarrassment, but my sister-in-law snapped.

"What did he just say to me?" she wailed, and then wept like La Llorona.

London had evolved into a short, scurrying time bomb. My wife and I take our children everywhere, and London, loaded with that one lexical bullet, ticked along to birthday parties, various parks and playgrounds, and the grocery store. And he lived up to Chekhov's rule of drama: If you have a shotgun in the first act, it has to go off in the second. London hitched otherwise mundane modifiers to his new linguistic engine. He called our butcher "stinking pussy," his playmate Augie "Robopussy" (after a terrible Alvin and the Chipmunks video); even my father became the benevolent "Grandpa pussy."

Most people thought our anxiety around the word stemmed from a nightmare of our son becoming a foul-mouthed sailor at preschool, dropping the F-bomb, smoking Luckies and drinking mouthwash. I hesitate to admit I kind of loved the anticipation of the adult reaction to my little Don Rickles: the p.c. glares in our direction, then the pat questions about leonine friends at home, or perhaps overhearing our bedroom TV blasting videos you can only rent with a photo I.D. after midnight.

"Pussy" made the boring dinner party tolerable, the dance recital closer to a punk rock concert. "Pussy" broke the structure of our soccermomstrumental week. The part I didn't foresee was the discomfort people felt even discussing the metafact that London had become this cunning linguistic prodigy.

We were at a holiday party, and I was thinking about all this: language, meaning, interpretation and the profane. One of my current student's parents also attended this festive get-together and the couple asked what I was working on. About eight people huddled in our wine-slurping circle, eating imported tomatoes that had been dried in some exotic sun. I hesitated telling them, but figured we were all enlightened liberal adults -- and besides, the point still remained: London did not know what the word meant. It was just a "fa" in his song, a narrative scrap blowing in his mind's dust devil. So I said: "I've been thinking a lot about pussy."

The chewing stopped, mouths held the wine a beat longer before swallowing, the glances no longer seemed casual or mildly flirtatious. I let the sentence linger longer because I was my son's father and I wanted to experience fully what London had discovered: the power of a word.

Recent Stories