Juvenile Kineto Osmosis
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Tuesday, December 15, 2009 3:32 PM
I think I’ve mentioned before that I come from a nerdy family. We like language. We do not say “decimate” when we mean “annihilate” and we do not say that things make us “nauseous.” If one of us uses the word “myself” when he should use “I” or “me,” he’s sure to get the evil eye from at least one other family member.
Some of you are probably shuddering at that idea, but our family’s obsession is fun for us, I promise. Some families have college football or chili-cookoffs or stamp collecting; we have language. It’s just one of our Things.
My dad is a writer (published, even!) and my mom devours books faster than anyone I know, so we come by our language fixation honestly. All but one of us wear corrective lenses, so if you appreciate a cliché you may imagine us with thick glasses perched upon our noses, pedantically correcting grammatical errors in the newspaper, laughing until we cry over Anguished English, and reaching for the dictionary when we have a pronunciation dispute.
Good luck out-nerding us!
Firmly in the category of Family Nerdiness is the name of theory of my parents’ that I’ve always thought was pretty clever and that, as a parent, I now find hilarious and uncannily insightful.
My parents call it the Juvenile Kineto Osmosis theory. It sounds fancy, but it means this: children get their energy by sucking it out of the nearest available adult.
Dad gives this evidence: if you shut two kids and two adults in a room for an afternoon, what will you find when you open the door? Two exhausted adults, and two kids who are bouncing off the walls. The obvious explanation is that the children sucked the energy out of the grown-ups.
My experience as a parent suggests that this theory is true. What do you think?
I think that if you find yourself with energy to spare, you better use it to run a few miles or clean a closet, quickly. Otherwise your kids might suck it right out of you, and you certainly don’t want to take that risk!
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