Don't need explaining

What, exactly, should you do when one of your dinner companions keeps steering the conversation back to booger-butts?

No, I'm not talking about L., whose dinner conversation is generally relatively polished. I'm talking about the little girl, and the way in which a chat about the day's events can suddenly grind to a halt and then give way to a series of combinatory permutations involving booty, or bottom.

We know what the theorists say. We've read, for instance, William Bastone's "The Point of Reception Theory," and are thus familiar with his contention that "She plays with the play of language. Like adolescents who play with social roles and future identities; like the clever slave who plays with the plot. And this play is an act of world construction and of self-construction, one that proceeds in part from mimesis and in part from figuration..." But such airy analysis, while broadly comforting, hardly helps us in shaping our response to a sudden, snickering charge that we are a Mr. Bottom Butt.

And so we reach elsewhere for aid - and find it, finally, in a pop song that's been floating about us for a few months now. That's Jason Derulo's 'Talk Dirty to Me,' a collaboration featuring 2 Chainz that is built around a combination of salty innuendos and blunt, overt sexual reference. At root, it's a series of propositions - but a part of it can also work, I find, as an emphatic rejoinder to Cleo's intentionally  irreverent neologisms. I'm thinking, that is, of this pair of lines, near the outset:

Been around the world, don't speak the language
But your booty don't need explaining.

Yeah, yeah, Derulo is likely referring to the universal language of lust. Or perhaps, as Spin has it (in referring to the song's 'international polyglot/clusterfuck pop atmosphere'), it's an ode to an emergent strain of promiscuity in an era of globalism.

But I prefer to imagine that Derulo dines regularly with a 4-year-old - and is simply growing weary of trying to understand, and respond to, the stream of naughty mash-ups. Booger-butt? Mr. Bottom Butt? Your booty, Cleo, don't need explaining.