KTel

Darwin likes to sing now and will pay a great deal of attention when I’m singing with a desire to sing a long, which is great. Currently he counts to 11 using 7 numbers, 1 2 3 4 9 10 11, what with nine sounding quite similar to five. So recently we’ve been singing “Once I caught a fish alive” to help with his counting skills. 

Comically I can sing lines of songs which he repeats, so this old whacky bastard (me) has to rein himself in a bit. I was tempted for comic effect to sing lines from the “Winkers song” by Ivor Biggun, or maybe “Fucking Hostile” by Pantera, but I don’t want him to be a sweary chav kid. Kerry has already taught him how to say ‘crap’! 

That aside, I do like a good old swear and I believe it’s an essential part of modern day grammar to be able to describe things effectively. I can understand that your most eloquent and articulate people would argue that there is a word to describe exactly how one is feeling in the most extreme of situations, but in this day and age where words are becoming taken over with the most minimal abbreviations (LOL, WTF?, OMG etc.) is there any need for them? Take ‘tumultuous’ for example, I don’t know anyone who has ever used the word, and the descriptive qualities of the word are lacking. On the night of the Manchester riots if I had described the scene as being tumultuous I would have been grammatically correct, it means ‘uproarious, riotous, or turbulent’ (I’ve never heard anyone use ‘uproarious’ either!) but it doesn’t describe the scene well. ‘Fucking mental’ is far more descriptive and truthful. I reckon we can easily drop about 20% of English words. 

However, I don’t want Darwin swearing until he’s a bit older. I think mild swearing will be acceptable from 14 onwards (Bloody, Chuffin, Tits!), maybe allow ‘Shit’ at 15, but the F’s, C’s and T’s should be saved until the post 16 years. 

Any road, me and D made a video at the weekend taking inspiration from the Ktel adverts from the 70’s.

"The KTel Ad"