A few weeks ago, I asked a slighlty misbehaving Miss Maple why it was that she wasn’t willing to perform some certain action that I had requested of her.

“Because I’m not a semperable person,” she replied.

“What does semperable mean?” I asked.

I got no real answer. But still, from time-to-time, the explanation persisted. Why won’t you brush your teeth? Why won’t you sit on the potty? Why did you throw your crayons on the floor?

“I’m not a semperable girl.”

I don’t know what phrase she is twisting, or if she invented the word semperable herself. But, in the structuralist meaning-making framework of our household, it makes total sense.

Semperable is the state of being where you feel fine, you’re happy to coexist with others. You might even be having fun.

But the flip side, we all feel: grumpy, dissatisfied, bored, and jaded. This is “not semperable,” and, while I feel like I am the daddy and I should be able to enforce “semperable” states of being in order to, for example, eliminate the concern that Maple might decide to dump the entire contents of the pantry out on the floor out of a sheer desire just to do so. As the interplay between our parental desire to get shit done, and Maple’s three-year-old nature to oppose her parent’s every instruction continued, the vocabulary emerged.

The word lives. And now, interactions in our house might flow a little bit like this:

“Maple, will you get out of the tub now?”

“Yes. Here I come!”

“Oh, Maple! You are so semperable!”

So the phrase is now in widespread use in our house, and I encourage you to join in the fun.