November | 2013 | The Head of the Heard

If Darth Vader had been a good dad. blurppy.com

I am a bad daddy.

My wife is a bad mamãe. My dad is a bad do doe (granddad) and my mum is a bad nana.

How do I know this? Because my son has told us all exactly how bad we are. And the thing is I am very happy about it.

My parents came to visit for a couple of weeks (hence the lack of posts) and one of the upshots has been the change in Mr. T’s language. In the week before my folks arrived he seemed to be experimenting a lot more with different sounds and words, but when they were here and giving him their undivided attention he really started to use a lot more words.

One of the interesting things has been his sudden use of adjectives. He was already using the words ‘big’ and ‘ninho‘ (little) but now he uses them for more abstract ideas, like a big burp or a big fart. He will also occasionally call somebody silly.

He has also started to say that things are hot by saying ‘too hot’. I love this phrase because he is using ‘too’ to mean ‘very’, which is exactly what a lot of my Brazilian students do until I tell them that ‘too’ actually carries connotations of excess and so doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘very’. His pronunciation of ‘too hot’ is also interesting as he says ‘too wot‘, changing the /h/ sound for a /w/. This is actually a feature of connected speech because if you drop the /h/ sound you are left with two vowels from the end of ‘too’ and the beginning of ‘ot‘. In order to move between the two sounds without having a pause we make a small linking /w/ sound. I was fascinated to hear him saying this as it shows he is picking up on minor sounds that as adult speakers of a language we would probably just miss.

Anyway, to get back to why I am happy to be a bad dad. Mr. T’s new favourite adjective is ‘bad’. Everything is ‘bad’, even when it’s good. He knows what it means because he corrects you when you say something is ‘good’, although he hasn’t said ‘good’ yet.

So if you are playing a game with him he will suddenly stop and say, with the biggest and most beautiful grin, ‘Bad daddy!’ and then repeat it over and over again. If you are tickling him, in the middle of one if his belly laughs he will sneak out a ‘bad mommy’ which will set him off all over again. If you are being a bit naughty he will tell you so in no uncertain terms.

I am happy with this because he has picked up a new word and is experimenting with it. He is checking out how it can be used with different nouns and seeing the reaction he gets. And he is having great fun in doing so.

So that is why I am a happy bad daddy.

The Dog House Diaries

Further Reading I have now moved on to ‘1974’ by David Peace. It is the first in a series of detective stories that take place in the north of England. It is brutal, but eminently readable. I’ll be reading the rest of the series, but I think I deserve a break first because this first one is all bout extreme violence and pedophilia.

Rules of rapid connecting speech / linking (linkingphonetics.wordpress.com)
David Peace – Red Riding 1974 (afictionhabit.wordpress.com)

VitrWhovian (redbubble.com)

Now that was pretty bloody amazing!

The 50th anniversary of Dr. Who has to be one of the best televisual treats I’ve seen in a long time. Except I didn’t see it on TV I went to the cinema to watch it in 3D. I loved every single minute of it; Doctors old and new, in-jokes, the brilliant reaction of the audience in the theatre.

This audience reaction was something I was not expecting. I don’t really know anybody here that I can have a conversation with about Dr. Who. I wouldn’t call myself a Whovian, but I would like to watch an episode and then talk about it. And this was the only real problem with the anniversary; despite being in a room full of people I still celebrated it on my own.

You see, My wife doesn’t really do sci-fi of any description. She has seen a few episodes of Dr. Who and the remarks she made might well be grounds for divorce from a less forgiving man than myself. Most Brazilians I know in Curitiba are baffled when I talk about the Tardis, Daleks and Cybermen, so they were no use. My son is only just 2 years old so he hasn’t got a clue, but he does like the Tardis if only because it’s blue.

So I have started making plans to rectify this for the 60th anniversary. There is no chance of me converting my wife and making her see the value of fighting off Armageddon every week from a police phone box. I’ll attempt to spread the word among my Brazilian friends and family, but my hopes aren’t that high. Which just leaves my son.

I reckon if I start in 5 years by buying him the 2005 re-boot of Dr. Who with Christopher Ecclestone, and then every few months buying him a new one, by the time he is 12 and Dr. Who is celebrating its diamond anniversary he should be ready to go with me to the cinema or wherever it is that people will be going 10 years in the future.

Of course, this supposes that Dr. Who will still be going in 10 years. Either Peter Capaldi will still be going strong or they will have had to have found some way around the fact that there aren’t supposed to be any more incarnations.

L-R: William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, Matt Smith (Wikipedia)

Further Reading

I have decided to start a new thing on my blog. At the end of each (most?) posts I am going to briefly write about which book I am reading at the moment. The main reason to do this is that when I read through all this stuff again in the months and years to come it will remind me of some of the great things I was reading.

Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov. I can’t believe I have never read this series of books until now. This is the second book of the Foundation series and I will certainly be reading the rest of them pretty soon.