ear LPG, 

I think that I have a little story with a moral for you…  

My son recently changed his job and he now drives to work each day.  We have always talked a lot on the phone even though he lives quite a way away but his new-fangled car with its new-fangled telephone system makes his phone calls even more frequent because it connects my voice to the cars speakers.  Because of this I get more of a blow by blow account of the day-to-day goings on in his house than with my other children.  They all call regularly but his daily calls keep me more up to date and closer to the details of what he is up to, while his regularly timed calls also double as an alarm wake-up (well, more of a get up) call each week day morning.   

Perhaps because our calls are so frequent I know so much more about the day to day goings on in his household.  His calls occasionally start a little earlier; before he delivers his little ones off at their pre-school child minder and the conversation that generated this conversation was one of the early ones.  

I was pleasantly surprised to be greeted with ‘Hello, Grandma’ rather than ‘How are you doing mum’ on the day in question but I could tell that one of my two grandchildren was not at his happiest.  My first utterance was typical Grandma reaction, ‘Hello little ones, are you being good.’  But one of my young grandsons answered that question by telling me that his brother had called him a nincompoop. 

Trying my best to be tactful as well as authoritarian, I mentioned that the utterer of the word should think before calling his brother by any derogatory name because he might well find himself being introduced as the sibling of one someday in the future.  I could almost hear the pout that resulted from my comment.  I then asked if he actually knew what the word means.  He answered. ‘Dad always uses it when he is upset with me.’  I insisted that he should only really use a word if he knows what it means but it occurred to me that I did not know much about a word that I had often used when annoyed with their father.   

Later, when talking with their father alone, my own son told me that it is the word he often uses as a substitute for many others when he needs to exercise control over his children while also exercising control over his own utterings.   

We looked it up and its meaning is fairly predictable.  It implies that the person it is directed at has lost their marbles somewhat and was first recorded some 350 years ago.  But it occurs to me that we all use words that we don’t really know much about.  Let’s face it, I have been aiming it at my children for years without actually knowing what I was calling them and it proves that, though we often think that our children completely forget what we teach them some of it sticks.   

Still, better that word than some of the ones that I could have indirectly taught my son to use through my own example; and the irony is that I never found out exactly what the seemingly innocent brother did to provoke that reaction in the first place. 

To become a grandparent, you have to have been a parent and, though it might seem that most of us grandparents have children who have completely deviated from the unwritten rules that we taught them when they were young, I think that this proves that some of what we tried to instil in them really does stick! 

GM, Brockley