"Boo-Boo" Use Declines, "Owee" Inclines

"Coincidence?" Conspiracizes Scientific Community

by sigmund jung

WASHINGTON, DC--The American Psychological Association announced today the results of a six-year study that found a definite correlation between the decreased use of the term "boo-boo" by parents with their children and the increased use of the term "owee" by the same group under similar circumstances.

"About ten years back, I started noticing that child-rearers were cutting certain words and phrases out of their everyday vocabulary," showed-off head researcher Norman J. Finkel, of Georgetown University's Department of Psychology. "Common examples included such now-taboo-around-youth expressions as 'ascot' and 'conte'; but 'boo-boo' really stood out for me."

Finkel claimed he received funding from "a large pharmaceutical company" to research this phenomenon. What he and his team discovered is that precisely that subset of the parent population that has been self-censoring has showed a marked increase in the use of are called "underoffending synonyms", words that convey the same meaning, but are deemed acceptable speech.

"We found that words like 'boo-boo' were uttered less and less, and that words like 'owee' were picking up the slack. It wasn't that these kids stopped skinning their knees. It also wasn't that the concept behind 'boo-boo' and the like had, for some reason, become reviled. We used twelve separate control groups to verify this," rambled Carol S. Weissbrod, Associate Professor of Psychology at American University and researcher. "We have strong evidence that these parents suffer from an unconscious 'sounds dirty' mindset, which, compounded with their overprotective nature and their inability to recognize their prepubescent children as sexual beings, makes them borderline psychotics."

The APA-sponsored study has its critics. Rolf Peterson, Director of Clinical Psychology at George Washington University, vomited, "Not only is this study professionally flawed, both in its concept and execution, it is also one of the worst misuses of corporate funds I've ever seen. To consider linguistically careful parents to be psychologically disturbed is a horrible misuse of psychology and all its stands for."

In response to the study's findings, the sponsoring pharmaceutical company is reportedly developing a drug that would induce coprolalia, "the vocalizations [consisting of] inappropriate words and phrases" often associated with Tourette Syndrome, "to help ease the suffering of these repressed individuals." Inside sources hint at a Christmas release date.