Word to Your Motha: Obstreperous

For this week’s Word to Your Motha I thought I’d pick a word that would be useful in the final days leading up to Christmas. If your household is anything like mine, I’m sure you’ve found the closer we get to the holiday the stronger your desire is to call the whole goddamn thing off. The kids have succeeded in draining all the good will from your body and beat every remaining ounce of joy from your frazzled, weary soul. If you do in fact feel this way, allow me to help.

Obstreperous – adj. Resisting control in a noisy and difficult manner; unruly.

This is the perfect word with which to threaten your children this week. Most likely we all will have ample opportunity to use it, perhaps even on numerous occassions. At this most critical time don’t be fooled as I was into thinking that children will be on best behavior. It seems my kids can only be good in limited spurts, and they must have used up all their goodness at the beginning of the month. By the week three of December, they’re all out. This is why I threaten to tell the Elf they are being obstreperous and perhaps he should inform Santa. The kids may not know what the hell I’m talking about, but they do know it doesn’t sound good. They quickly drop whatever loud, irritating, disruptive behavior they were engaged in and snap to a sorrowful, contrite attention. For added impact you may want to follow up with this effective phrase: If they don’t cut it out this instant Santa’s not coming, and they will never see the elf again! At this point they will run sobbing out of the room, but at least it will be quiet.

Not only can the word act as a threat, but it can also provide a learning opportunity. Threatening your children with an unknown term is the perfect time to teach them a new vocabulary word and express to them how truly awful they were.

I hope this helps to make your season merry and bright. Best wishes for a peaceful house and non-irritating holiday!

Have you found yourself with a bunch of obstreperous children of late? What have they done to drive you exclaim the elf is being extradited to Tunisia and held in a cold, dark, squalid cell until they learn how to behave?

photo credit: RaGardner4 via photopin cc