‘What does rip mean,’ my son asked his mum. ‘It means to tear or cut,’ she answered, offhandedly. She’s more literal than I am, so she couldn’t see the existential query that was coming. ‘Huh,’ my son replied. ‘I thought so. Like on a grave.’ At this, she buffered. ‘Grave? Oh no that’s different. RIP stands for Rest in Peace. It’s something nice we say to people… when they… uh… pass away.’
‘Oh,’ he said, looking confused. ‘I thought it meant that if you rip all of someone’s hair out, then they die.’
I try to keep the Kids Really Do Say The Darnedest Things parts of parenting to a minimum in this column, but this did make us laugh out loud. I suppose it’s because my son’s literacy is coming along so fast, I sometimes forget he is five, and still figuring out how the world works. Such is the quandary faced by anyone trying to shepherd a fresh, wet brain through a world filled with words, terms, phonemes and phrases they’re expected to digest in one big mulching gulp.
We’re currently experiencing language acquisition at two speeds. In our daughter’s case, it’s speaking, and she now has a smattering of words she wields like cudgels – mama, dada, brother, water – throwing them around like spat lava, demanding our service or attention. Others, she pronounces with innocent delight – star, cat, tree, dog – as she points at things.
In my son’s case, we have this same effect on a slightly higher setting. He was an early reader and has now proven literate to the point of prodigiousness. Please don’t misunderstand: I am bragging about his reading ability in the hope that it reflects well on me, but it does have its drawbacks. He reads his own books from school, but finds them boring and pushes himself to read more challenging (read: violent and gross) texts for his own bedtimes. This was, of course, only a hop, skip and a jump to him surreptitiously reading books, messages and, on one occasion, an issue of Viz over my shoulder, and reciting the Anglo-Saxon phrasing he found therein.
Like a newsagent, we’ve learned to keep less suitable material in higher places, and he exercises by reading books to his sister, (which he finds adorable), until she makes him read their thick cardboard pages over and over again, (which he does not).
Mostly, however, there is the wonder and curiosity of someone with a new skill desperate to sharpen it at will. Unfortunately, I don’t have all the answers and this sometimes reveals more about me than him.
‘What does MOT mean?’ he asks, as we passed a garage. I did not, at that time, know that it stood for Ministry of Transport, so in a moment of weakness, I hesitate. While he learns about the world and words around him, I’m learning that there are many words I see every day that I’ve never asked about myself. And, moreover, that I am too much of an intellectual fraud to admit this to a five-year-old boy.
‘Umm… it means… Motor…vehicle, uh, Operations… Test.’
It would be nice to tell you I’ve corrected myself since, but I have not. I can only hope he asks again. Insecure 38-year-old men, I tell myself, we really do say the darnedest things.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats