The Term

Last week, I helped keep an 11-monthold baby while his mama was away on a business trip. This little baby boy is a ball of energy—all giggles and wide eyes and chubby little fingers grabbing at everything.

Per his mother’s schedule, bath time was set for 6:20 p.m. every evening. So at 6:15 p.m., I carried him into the bathroom, armed with a soft washcloth and a rubber duckie, and went about the business of washing him from head to toe with lavender baby wash. While he splishsplashed around in the tub, I narrated the whole affair in that ridiculous, sing-songy baby talk that adults use around tiny human beings.

“Okay, now let’s wash your little hand,” I cooed. “Now let’s wash that little foot,” I continued. Then his ears. I worked my way over every inch of the baby, naming each part as I went—head, neck, tummy, arm, leg, toes—until I arrived at a certain area submerged under the water.

That’s when it came back to me. Growing up, my mother had a term for those most private of private parts—both male and female. She called them the bosta kotter. Now, I’ll confess right here that I have no earthly idea how to spell this term, having never once seen it written down. But in our family, everybody knew what it meant. My grandmother, Ona Jarriel, used it first with my siblings and cousins, and Mom carried on the tradition with us. Come bath time, she’d remind us children to make sure we washed our bosta kotters, meaning the areas between our legs. When my nephews and nieces were born, sure as the world, she used the term around them, too.

I have never, in all my years, heard a single soul outside our family use the term. But sitting beside that bathtub last week, it popped right into my head and I started laughing.

Bosta kotter. It is, without question, one of the silliest combinations of syllables in the English language. Anyway, I washed the baby’s bosta kotter without naming it, and well, I quickly moved on to pajama time and reading two or three books before placing him in his crib in a sleep sack.

Every family seems to have their own unique vocabulary for the human body—words passed down, used behind closed bathroom doors, whispered to toddlers in tubs. Some are sweet. Some are ridiculous. Some are both.

Our whole culture is teeming with funny, folksy stand-ins for anatomical terms. We say fanny and hiney and badonkadonk instead of butt or backside. We refer to breasts as ta-tas, boobs, the girls or the ladies, as though they themselves are sentient beings. Men have their willies, wieners, johnsons and tallywackers. Women have their hoo-has and vajayjays.

And in our family, we have our bosta kotters.

Also of note in my family, we used the word tooted to describe the act of passing gas. When my sister was raising her daughter and son, she would often look at her blue-eyed children and ask, “Do I smell a fluff? I think someone in this room fluffed.”

And don’t get me started on number one and number two, denoting urine and bowel movements.

Why do we do this? I think, deep down, the human body makes us all a little uncomfortable. So we invent crazy, warm, harmless words. Laughter is how we make peace with the awkward parts of being human. So we inherit our grandmother’s or mother’s silly words, we pass them on to the next generation in bathtubs amid suds, bubbles and bobbing duckies.

And so, in our family, the term bosta kotter lives on. Don’t forget to wash yours.