The Obscurer

My son is nearly two years old, and his vocabulary and communication skills are advancing apace (I apologise to those who feel I talk about my family life a bit too much. If that applies to you then I suggest you move along. There’s nothing for you here).

Most of his conversational English is limited to single words, perhaps prefixed be the word “di”, which is his way of saying “the”. So, we have “di out”, when he wants to go outside; “di walk” accompanied by a pointing manoeuvre aimed at his shoes when he wants to go for a toddle; “di bin” when he has found a microscopic substance on the floor which he wants rid of; and “di dance” when he wants me to pick him up and knacker myself out, jigging along to his favourite songs such as “Stumble and Fall” by Razorlight, “Brassneck” by The Wedding Present or “Unbelievable” by EMF (he is clearly up for Backing Blair).

He does occasionally burst out with a few two word phrases that take us aback; “sorry mum” once when he bumped into my wife; “pig book” when he wants us to read “Wibbly Pig” to him; “more fruit” when he wants another peach to eat, followed by “mmm, nice” as he scoffs it, “oh dear” if he drops it, and “all gone” when he has finished it.

We do sometimes get longer sentences; for example “bye-bye, see y’soon” as a ‘plane passes overhead (which happens regularly, we are fortunate enough to live under the flight-path for Manchester Airport) but usually a long sentence requires lots of filling; so instead of saying “father, one is hungry and is most anxious that one may be allowed to partake in a slice, maybe two, of that delicious roasted topside one did most recently purchase from the butchers” we usually get “di di di di di di di di di meat”. Actually, I prefer the latter to the former. Still, the other day I got a hell of a shock when he ran up to me and said “Daddy, what r’y doin’…books?” as I sat perusing a paperback.

Of course, the pronunciation isn’t quite there for many words; he still has his own terms for certain objects. So, chocolate is “dot-dot”, biscuit is “bee bit” and banana is “nanis”, a corruption of the original “nana”. In the main I find these words very cute, but less so when they have been shouted at top volume, continuously for five minutes, while I have a headache that feels as if someone has taken a garden claw to my left temple. Which does happen from time to time.

However, there are a few things I have particularly noticed about the way my son talks, and they are;

• He pronounces some “l” sounds as “w”. So bottle becomes “bott-uw”, when every one knows that around these parts children should pronounce bottle as “bock-ul”. Similarly, when he once had a fit asking for “we-wees” we were utterly confused, until my wife twigged that he wanted to wear his wellies.
• For some reason, when my son says “the horse” it comes out as “di ‘ose”, in the way one would imagine a poor David Bowie impressionist would speak the words; a dropped “h”, and the rest of the word said as in“hose”, but with a hard “s” sound rather than a softer “z”, if that makes any sense.
• Although he eschews the glottal (or should that be “glo’al”) stop, he makes use of its distant cousin, in that rather than dropping “t”s, he drops “p”s; so apple becomes “a’ull”; or rather “a’uw”, since he still pronounces an “l” as a “w”.

The overall result is that my son seems to speak in a vaguely estuary English accent, at least when he says certain words; but why? Neither my wife nor I speak that way. If he has learnt his speech from copying, then from whom has he been copying?

The most obvious explanation is the oft-quoted belief that as we watch and listen to more of the national media our regional accents and dialects will die out, to be replaced by the most prevalent speech form of the times, which is currently believed to be estuary English. This I feel would be a rather sad, but likely explanation. While I would like to think that his mother and I play a major role in his life, I suspect my son pays more attention to the words of Bella from the Tweenies than he does to either of us.

Alternatively, is it possible that my son is simply speaking in the manner that is the easiest for him to enunciate? Is it perhaps the case that he talks in the same way that every other small child in the UK has done for hundreds of years? In other words, what I am trying to suggest is, could it be that the speakers of estuary English are simply using a speech pattern that has failed to progress beyond the standards of your average (not quite) two year old?

Welcome to the website that is the number one hit on Google for tsunami seamonsters. Not for “tsunami seamonsters” as a single phrase mind you. Inexplicably there are no hits for “tsunami seamonsters”; until now that is. But if you want to know about tsunamis and seamonsters, then Google believe this should be your first port of call.

But not just Google; AltaVista, Yahoo!, Lycos, A9 and the BBC all place me in pole position for such a search. On Info I have been pipped into the number two slot by something called Neptune’s Web, while MSN leave me languishing way down, just sneaking into the top 10. I wonder what I could have done to offend them?

Now there is no mystery as to why someone typing tsunami and seamonsters into a search engine will get to my site. I wrote a post a few weeks back about the Asian tsunami, or rather about peoples’ reactions to the tsunami. I also update the Listening section on my sidebar quite regularly, and recently The Wedding Present’s CD “Seamonsters” has been on my turntable (or at least it has been in my CD player beneath my turntable) and so has been mentioned on this site.

No, the real enigma is why two (yes two) people have found their way to The Obscurer by typing tsunami seamonsters into a search engine. Is there something we don’t know? Is there something we aren’t being told? Are we unwittingly enjoying the twilight of the human race as we know it, unaware of the threat to our very existence posed by these frightening creatures? Could it be that only two people in the world, one from from Fenton, Missouri, the other from Willboro, New Jersey, are aware of this danger, and desperate for further information they both made their way through cyberspace to this website, and presumably were somewhat disappointed to find the meaningless ramblings of a nearly middle-aged Briton, droning on about football and television, about the perils of de-icing cars and the parking problems in Stockport town centre.

Well allow me to make amends. Could the next person to arrive here looking for tsunami seamonsters please avail themselves of the comments facility? Please, reveal what the concern is; what have we to fear? Leave your details in case any further seamonster hunters pass by; that way you can get in touch with each other, and perhaps I can play a small part in kick starting the action required to save mankind from this maritime menace.

I don’t want any thanks for this service, or any form of reward; although a blue plaque on my house would be nice; I know just the spot for it. Nothing fancy, just so long as it mentions “saviour of humanity”; something like that.

Well, more ice than snow, really. Not much time this week for serious blogging, so instead here is a cautionary tale for all of you out there, dear kind, gentle readers, as the frosty mornings set in.

I was bought one of those insulating frost sheets you put across your car’s windscreen, so that when you leave for work in the morning (or leave work in the morning if you are on the night shift) you have a wonderfully clear and frost free windscreen and can set off in minutes. Super.

One evening, as the frost set in, I decided to make use of the sheet, with the idea that I could grab a few extra moments in bed in the morning rather than have to get up early to scrape my car. This involved a bit of jiggery-pokery at first, as I tried to jam either end of the sheet inside the front doors of my car, without also trapping part of my hand. Finally successful, I retired to bed, and looked forward with a certain smugness to my swift departure the following day.

During the night, I surmise, the weather did something like this; there was an initial downpour, which covered all the cars on my street in a thin veneer of rainwater; this duly froze as the temperature dropped below freezing; there then followed a change in the weather, a warm front and a thaw, so the ice on the cars had melted by the time I was ready to leave for work.

I left my house on the last minute, as I had prepared to do, and noticed all the frost-free cars parked along my road. Clearly I had put the frost sheet on in vain, but no matter I thought; I had not lost out on anything.

I approached my car and pulled off the frost sheet; or at least I tried to. It was stuck fast. I pulled again and slowly, gradually, I peeled the sheet from the car. It seemed that, during the night, when it rained, the water had fallen and flowed behind the sheet, where it had frozen, as on every other car. Then, however, as the temperature rose, the insulating nature of the frost sheet had prevented the ice on my car from thawing; as a result I now had a 2 centimetre thick covering of ice across my whole windscreen. Thanks to my special “frost-defying cover sheet” I was now the only person on my street who had to scrape their car that morning. Correction; I didn’t just scrape it, I had to hack at it and chip away at the ice, it was that thick. God alone knows what my neighbours thought, seeing me clearing ice from my car when there was not a hint of frost anywhere else on the street.

The moral of the story, of course, is don’t buy one of those evil devices; unless it is a present for someone you really don’t like. Perhaps that is how I came by mine?

Unless something weird happens, this will be my last post before Christmas, so have a good one. In the meantime, read this from Harry’s Place; a series of mock Christmas articles supposedly from well known journalists and other bloggers. Plenty of chin-stroking fun as you congratulate yourself on recognising their individual styles. Take care.