I'm trying to break my son of a bad habit: he's starting to preface things with "No offense, but..." I first took note of this little verbal crutch while driving him and a couple of his friends to practice the other night.
"At recess I scored the winning touchdown because [the quarterback] saw that I was being covered by [another one of his classmates]. No offense, but he stinks and so I was basically wide open."
and then,
"No offense, but he's a total liar. He was definitely tagged."
On the spectrum of bad habits, this new one is not as disfiguring as nail biting (which he dabbles in) or as disgusting as nose picking (which, thankfully, to my knowledge, he does not) but it is way up there in terms of being-- for lack of a better word-- offensive.
I explained to my son and the other boys that saying "no offense" doesn't get you off the hook for whatever follows. In searching for an example that would illustrate the lesson without singling any one of them out, the best I could come up with was "What if I said to Lady Gaga 'No offense, but I don't think you are very pretty.'?"
Missing my point completely, one of the boys piped up "But she isn't pretty." He then started singing along to the radio, loudly changing the words of the Maroon 5 hit to "Boobs like Jagger." Hilarity ensued.
Third grade boys are so painfully lowbrow. No offense. (Ha! None taken. As if! They revel in it. Little buggers.)
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