My father used to throw a string of German insults at us: Lausbub, Dumkopf, Schweinhund, Esel!
Dad: "Quit your crying or I'll give you something to cry about!"
Dad: "What if everybody did that?" (Family of eight.) I'm sure I had a smart-ass response once early on, and maybe even tried a reasoned response once or twice, but quickly learned it was just better not to "do that".
Dad: If we'd get some sort of cut or bruise on a leg or an arm, and we ran to him crying, he'd offer to amputate just above the injury.
Dad: "Your mother's such a cheap drunk she could get high from sniffing an empty beer can." (It really didn't take much before she was, as she would say, "looped". "Tight" was another word she used to mean tipsy.)
Mom: "I'll knock you right into the middle of next week." (Always wondered exactly what this sort of time travel would look/feel like but was way too fearful to risk it. Besides, I'd miss all the intervening TV shows.)
My grandmother: "Kleine Kinder, kleine Sorgen; grosse Kinder, grosse Sorgen!" Little kids, little worries; big kids, big worries. Sometimes she would substitute Schmerzen (pains) for Sorgen.
Things really did happen when Dad got home, and they were not pretty.
Once we got old enough to go out in the evening by ourselves, we never had a curfew, and my parents never waited up for us. The rule simply was that we had to tell them where we would be, with whom, and when we would be home. The very first time I ever got drunk, though, I came home (on time) and, as I sort of stumbled through the living room on my way to the stairs, realized to my shock that for the first time in my life my father was sitting there still up, well past his usual bedtime, reading. I stood there, slightly dumbfounded, trying to keep from swaying back and forth. He just smiled, half to himself and half to me and said: "It looks like you've been a little close to the bottle!"
When my siblings and I were kids, for everyday use, we had a set of thick, nearly unbreakable plastic plates. When one of my siblings or I was out of reach and my mother was exasperated beyond words but there was a plate within reach, she would grab it and wing it at us. The bad news was that, if it hit you, it would really hurt. The good news was that she had terrible aim. As my brother still reminds her, all we had to do was to stand still and we'd be safe. And the chips in the kitchen wall supported his testimony.
One of the advantages of having a dachshund was that he could clandestinely maneuver under the table and chairs to quickly grab anything you discreetly snuck below the table in your hand, and a nice portion of what we didn't want to eat disappeared that way. One of the disadvantages was that even dachshunds don't like lima beans.
