Words

In conference

By all accounts words didn’t come easy to F.R. David. Sadly, this didn’t stop him writing one of the most annoying pop songs of the ‘80’s, a song which pops into my head every time someone mentions ‘words’... which at the moment is surprisingly often as words are currently dominating Marty’s life!

The rate at which his vocabulary is growing is frankly astonishing. Every day he seems to add at least three or four more words to his repertoire. I’ll grant you that they’re not the largest of words - ‘repertoire’ doesn’t feature for a starters - but these days virtually everything you say around him comes back seconds later at a higher pitch.

Of course his enunciation still leaves something to be desired and it does take a degree of imagination to translate his words - which is often helped by the fact that he’s stabbing a finger at whatever he’s talking about. The biggest barrier to translation is that he still struggles with certain letters of the alphabet, mainly the letter ‘P’. So we have ‘Tigger’, his little pink mate ‘Tiglet’ and their bear buddy who, according to Marty, is called ‘Mmmn’. Meanwhile, the word ‘Bear’ can be either a soft fruit or an animal that defecates in dense foliage – allegedly – and the sky above Lincolnshire is full of ‘banes’.

The oddest of all though is his word for Snowman, which is something along the lines of ‘Bow-bar”. Go figure!

As you might have gathered I’m rather proud of all this so it was with some dread that we all went to a kiddies birthday party attended by, amongst others, his nemesis. This is a lovely little girl who is about 5 months younger than Marty and is light years ahead of him; when he could barely sit up she was crawling, when Marty had learnt to crawl, she was walking, when Marty was walking, she was doing hand stands in the corner of the room....

So I entered the party fully expecting Marty to be running around the room, stabbing at the wallpaper and screaming ‘Tiglet’ whilst this young lady sat down at her high chair, turned to her mother and said “Mother dearest, could you possibly pass me some cutlery, I have an urge to dissect this pomegranate.”

But not a bit of it! If anything Marty has a better vocab! I was well impressed.

There is a downside to all this though, words after all have power. Marty should by now be fast asleep but as I write I can hear a tiny, mournful voice echoing from his room, “Tigger? w'are you? Daggy? w'are you?” The temptation to race into his room and cuddle him is almost overwhelming, but I suspect the clever little bugger knows that J