That's it!

My son is reaching that stage of development that docs call "the terrible twos", a period of testing the boundaries and mama's patience, the period of defiance and opposites. How do I know?

Imagine Sasha standing by the bookshelf, removing the books, one by one, and throwing them on the floor into a porridge of toys, water bottles, hand towels, etc. I am standing in the kitchen and raising my voice: "Саша! Нельзя! Нельзя, я сказала!" (Sasha! You may not! You may not, I said!), to which he replies: "Зя!" (Yes, I may!). And so we continue yelling back and forth: "Нельзя!" - "Зя!" - "Нельзя!" - "Зя!"

For those readers who grew up in the same cultural realm as I did, the humor is obvious, but for those American readers of mine, here is the video from the '80s that sums it all up:

These wonderful actors were part of the comedy group Лицедеи (Lizedeyi). This skit is absolutely applicable to all parent-child situations where the child rebels. Exactly my conversation with Sasha this morning.

Needless to say, there is no word зя in Russian language. Нельзя is a remnant of the old system, probably Old-Slavonic. The opposite of нельзя is можно (may). It's impossible to say не можно. One may either say нельзя or можно. But Sasha does not know the word можно (because he never asks me if he may do something, he just does it, and then I say that he may not). Instead, he figured out that не stands for not, and he creatively subtracted it from нельзя, while adding a new unit to his vocabulary - зя.