DAD DIARY: Correct and right

When you come from a newspaper background, you tend to have a penchant for correcting errors.

A fair portion of my life in The Mayo News was taken up with removing stray spaces between words. I would always marvel at the Local Notes correspondents who would type a word, then hit space bar and then insert the comma or full stop. They were putting extra work on themselves – and me. (Marvel is the kindest expression of my true feelings!)

Of course no reporter ought ever get too uppity about such matters. I make plenty of mistakes, and some of them were/are blind spots. It took me years to instinctively know the difference between it’s and its. I’m still not great on the use of ‘gone’ versus ‘went’.

Éamon is only five, but he is already showing signs of being a right pedant himself. He loves latching onto mistakes in expressions. It was cute at first….

Now that his three-year-old brother Séimí is making his way with speech and language, Éamon sees it as his full-time job to correct his younger sibling’s errors.

But I always try to stop him. Your kids use so many incorrect words and expressions that are just too cute to pull them up on. They will have long enough to learn the proper usage and pronunciation.

Séimí’s vocabulary has come on leaps and bounds in the past few months, but there are some words he hasn’t got the hang of, and we’re in no hurry for him to do so. The TV remote is the marote; the mirror is the menor. For a long time chicken nuggets were just uggets.

Oftentimes ambiguity can be entertaining.

Aisling was outside one day tidying up and spotted Séimí at the window holding her phone and talking out to her with a big happy head on him. Or at least that’s what she thought at first. Then she realised he was talking into the phone.

Nothing unusual in that; he loves pretending to be on the phone and has the Irish sign-off down pat – ‘Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye’.

But when Aisling went inside a few minutes later, she realised there was someone else on the other line! Séimí had gotten hold of the phone and managed to dial. He got through to Aisling’s last dialled number, Murray’s Recycled Plastics in Castlebar, where another Aisling was having a lovely chat with Séimí.

She asked Séimí if his mum or dad were nearby – a reasonable question when a three-year-old rings you. The answer, as far as Aisling from Murray’s could make out, was: “My Mammy’s dog is dead in the rain!”

I’m not sure where you would even start with trying to correct that!