‘Do I press “marketing”, Skeet?’
Marketing? What marketing? What the f—? ‘Oh, you mean “messages”? Yes, Dad that’s one way I showed you.’
Like Sister Maria teaching the von Trapp children to sing on a mountaintop, I said to myself, Let’s see if I can make this a little easier. I made Dad’s certificate his phone’s wallpaper so all he had to do on checking-in was open his phone and there it was as the background to his home screen. To hell with privacy!
‘Now you can do mine!’ Mum said, and I laughed so much my tummy hurt. Jude can be utterly hilarious when she chooses to be.
But then I gave in. ‘Oh, come on, give me your phone.’
I had already downloaded my own and Jeff’s vaccination certificates to our phones (involving a forty-minute phone call with the poor tortured souls at Medicare’s helpline) so, by the time I got to Mum’s, I managed it in the lightning-fast time of just under two hours. Then again, I had worked in e-commerce for over a decade and written books on how to use the internet. What chance in hell did people in my parents’ generation have, if they didn’t have a child or even better a grandchild on hand to complete this bureaucratic feat for them? We are all doomed on a rapidly sinking ship with no lifeboats . . . in a violent storm . . . way out at sea . . . with no radio contact . . .
‘I bet you’re glad you’ve only got two parents!’ Dad quipped in response.
Bless him. I could hug him. That one acknowledgement brightened up the rest of my day.
* * *
In the car Mum says: ‘The club had a case of the Covvids last week and had to shut down. I also read the Covvids was at the Targets in Maitland,’ she says without a hint of irony, or any indication she’s thrown in a few extra words and letters for free.
‘I think we’ve all heard the term about a trillion times in the past couple of years,’ I say drolly. ‘And it’s Coh-vid not Caw-vid. You’re saying it like it has two vs.’
‘Oh, sorry, Mister Perfect!’
‘I mean, really Mum.’
Since they’ve got older, the unnecessary placement of ‘the’ before certain words in conversation seems also to have become interchangeable with the word ‘your’ in my parent’s vocabulary. When this language device is employed in list-making it’s particularly impactful.
‘I had to buy lots of ingredients for that cake you wanted me to bake you,’ Mum says, counting out each item on her fingers. ‘Your almond meals, your oat butters, your coconut oils, your blanched almonds and your almond extracts.’
Surely they’ve heard ‘covid’ and other words they mispronounce on the news or elsewhere, yet they continually fall back to saying it wrong. Maybe one of the bingo ladies pronounced it that way and they assume she was correct?
‘He’s right, Jude, it’s Coh-vid’ Dad says, contradicting that idea. ‘What time do you think we’ll eat, Skeet?’ he continues. ‘My dia-bett-us is mucking up my blood sugars.’
‘About one,’ I say. ‘Why don’t you eat your sandwich?’
‘Maybe in a bit.’
‘Devon was on special at your Aldis this week,’ Mum says excitedly.
‘Yummo,’ Jeff delivers, deadpan.
Jeff asks me to turn on CarPlay to start up a playlist we created for longer drives. One of my favourite songs comes on and I sing along to it softly (though more audibly than a warble). I skip over one particular line.
‘Why didn’t you sing that line?’ Jeff asks, teasingly.
‘Which line?’
‘Oh, you know exactly which one I’m talking about!’
‘You know I just found out I’ve been getting the words wrong, now I still stumble on what words to say, as you well know.’
I’d been singing it wrong for decades. Isn’t it funny how when you’re having a singalong with friends and a song you’ve been singing for as far back as you can remember comes on and you roar it at the top of your lungs and your friends stop you and point out you have the lyrics wrong? For forty-odd years you’ve been singing nonsensical words and you never even stopped to think. Thanks to my friend Pet (Nicole) I only recently found out that Blondie line in ‘Heart Of Glass’ I struggled with included the word ‘mucho’. Who knew?
For a lot of us, our parents are like one of those songs. Thanks to them, we’ve spent a lifetime listening to lyrics we assumed were correct, but to the outside world we’ve had it laughably awry. Why hasn’t anyone corrected us before now?
I never realised I pronounced certain words incorrectly. It wasn’t until I served my friends ‘pun-kyun’ and ‘ung-yen’, and after much merriment and mickey-taking, I was informed that I should pronounce the words ‘pump-kin’ and ‘unn-eon’. To this day, I struggle with both, and need to take a second to prepare myself to deliver them properly before they pass over my lips. But then I also have this strange affliction of mispronouncing my own name ‘Tol Alesander’ – and my parents have nothing to do with that.
I always thought my parents spoke impeccably, but pumpkin and onion are just two small examples of how they’ve subconsciously been turning me into a social outcast. Well true, the over-gelled boofy hair and Cyndi Lauper concert T-shirts of my youth probably had more to do with that than how I pronounced certain vegetables, but still.
Mum adds additional letters to words wherever they take her fancy. Thank you becomes ‘thank youpe’. It’s such a particular quirk in our family that Dad also does it.
I’m lucky enough to have two kids of my own, Charlie and Lucy. Biologically they’re both from my loins, a donation I made to two female friends who’d gotten married and wanted a child each. The kids knew from the outset that I was technically their father and through fate and circumstance they came to call me Dad and occasionally ask me for advice. We’ve developed a lovely relationship that, while unconventional, has allowed me to play a parenting role in their lives that has only strengthened over recent years. Along with my sometimes-good advice and my always-good looks, I have also taken the opportunity to ensure ‘thank youpe’ continues to the next generation, and so taught it to Lucy and Charlie. I’ve noticed that it doesn’t take much for imitation to become habit. The kids and I, along with Vicky, Jane and Jeff, have so embraced this Jude-ism that ‘you’ is no longer in our vocabulary: it’s always ‘youpe’. If you’re texting each other, ‘thank you’ is shortened simply to ‘Qpe’.
Meanwhile, the phantom ‘s’ appears at the end of any number of shops (Subways, Sussans, Krispy Kremes) or brands (Nikes, TV Weeks, Danoz Directs). Perversely, sometimes it’s the ‘s’ sound that’s dropped altogether.
‘Did you watch that on Netflick?’ Mum asks, sounding proud of herself for knowing the name of a streaming service (well, nearly).
Mysteriously, other words are dropped out of conversation altogether. Probably through fear of saying the wrong thing and being promptly corrected, none of their grandchildren have boyfriends or girlfriends (or even the non-gendered ‘partner’); instead they’ve got a ‘friend’. It’s not until you’re halfway through the conversation with my parents that you realise the ‘friend’ they’re referring to comes with a few more fringe benefits than your average bestie. It can be a tad confusing when you’re talking about how many ‘friends’ are invited to your child’s sweet sixteenth.
I also know whenever my parents are talking about a gay person, because when the partner in question happens to be of the same sex, there’s a long pause in the statement or question.
‘And does Ben have a . . .’ Pop the kettle on. Steep the tea. Pour in the milk. Let it cool a bit. Walk it out into the garden. Take a sip. Sigh with satisfaction. Finish the cup. Walk back to the house. Rinse it out. Watch three episodes of Sex and the City. ‘. . . “friend”?’
I do appreciate that today’s world is a rapid-fire spraying of socially acceptable bullets. If you haven’t caught one as it whizzes past you, it’s quite possible you’ll be ostracised for getting something wrong next week, if not outright shamed. So we can’t really expect our parents to stay on top of language that seems to be changing daily when we (who are much more exposed to the diverse world) struggle to always get it right.
Recently my parents had the experience of meeting the trans daughter of an acquaintance. To their credit, they embraced her without question and I was immensely proud of them for this, their first ever interaction with someone who is trans. It did take considerable coaching for them to get used to referring to her with the right pronouns, but this was accomplished through fear they would cause offence if they accidentally said he.
* * *
