My grandson is in first grade. As a gabby pedant and a caring grandfather, I am making certain to teach him the verities I was taught.

Regular readers will recall that he knows that it is 15 items or fewer, not 15 items or less. No native English speaker says “I would like fewer water.” The general rule is that if you can count it, the word is “fewer.” To which he said, “If you freeze it and break it into pieces, you can ask for fewer water.” He apparently understands not just the concept, but its application.

Then, as we were watching television together[1], I heard a character say “very unique.” Nope, I opined, “Unique is binary; either it is or isn’t one of a kind. It cannot be very one of a kind, so don’t add any modifiers.” Now he spots that error too. As I taught him, he mocks it on television and in books, but not in person.[2]

Continued Here

[1] If I am going to let him watch the idiot box, I am going to be there to insure he gets something from it besides tranquilization

[2] With the exception of his sister.

My grandchildren certainly get taken to restaurants more than I was at their age. They are generally reasonably well behaved. And they have picked up on some aspects of running the business, including at least one bad one.

They built a restaurant kitchen that is a long narrow structure of pillows and blankets. It is pretty precarious. My grandson insists on crawling in and being the chef, and insists his sister stay out of the kitchen. On the face of it, that supports two discredited ideas: only women can cook, and women can’t be chefs.

At the same time, she only gets to serve as the waitress. She takes a small book from her extensive library and pretends it is a menu. She then reports the orders to him.

To poke a little fun at them, I ordered a plate of blither with some blather sauce. She delivered it post-haste. When Vicki ordered a salad, they cooked it in the “oven.” Tres Chic.

As mentioned previously, my 5-year-old grandson is an avid cook, and learning to bake. His sister, at two, is young for that… yet.

I have been teaching my grandson the difference between figurative and literal. I think he gets it; in the book we were reading, “her face fell” and “her eyes popped out.” “Figurative,” he said.

My greatest teaching aid has been the Adventures of the Gummi Bears. Apparently there was a poster in the writers’ room that said “When in doubt, make it literal.”

“He’s all washed up,” a character would say as the villain was swept away by a flood.

The rest of the examples escape me (I should have written them down), but if there was an angry chicken caught in a pool of water, next to a sputtering boss, the dumb characters would say, “The boss is madder than a wet hen.”

The more things change… my grandson recently asked looked at one of the classic containers. (sugar.png)

“Is that salt, Abba?” I was immediately taken back to 1964. My grandmother was working the snack counter at the Columbia Bowl alley on a Saturday during junior league play. I asked for an order of fries, then looked at the container and said to myself, “Oh, faster salt.” After thoroughly sugaring my fries, Nana said to me, “Don’t waste food.” I never made that mistake again and now my grandson won’t make it the firs time.

There was a time when my grandson ran to the door shouting “Abba, Abba” whenever I arrived to spend time with him at his home. Now that he’s 5, such exhibitions of enthusiasm are less regular.

But my 2-year-old granddaughter, who has just given up asking for a video call with me every day, now runs to the front door shouting “Abba, Abba” (the family name for grandfather). I know it’s just a stage, but it is flattering and humbling to receive that kind of attention. It makes me want to up my game.

OK, I admit I wasn’t talking about a donkey. I was on the phone with my friend Jim Forbes while watching my grandson, and I said “kick his ass” (among other things)

I was unaware the word “ass” had been promoted to “bad word.” My grandson told his mom I said it in front of him and his friend from next door.

I do try to avoid all the bad words from my youth, but I suspect I am no longer up to date.

* We were talking about something I do regularly. I said “Most of the time…” and my grandson jumped in to complete the sentence:  “it never works.” A nice twist.

* I was singing the Army Song (When the Caissons Go Rolling Along) and mentioned there were four branches of the military. My grandson asked, “The people are twigs?” I apparently had not explained branch was a metaphor.

* He asked why hell was a kind of bad word.  I told him prudish people sometimes said “H-E-Double Hockey Sticks.” He then schooled me on reincarnation, which he clearly understand well.

I had promised to make a sno-cone at our house, and wanted to expose my grandson to Peter and the Wolf.

Turns out our icemaker’s “crushed” ice is barely crushed at all. Even running it through the Cuisinart barely improved it. It was a grade B sno-cone (flavored with hazelnut syrup), but he told me he liked it, and he tends to be quite honest on the subject of food likes and dislikes, so I believed him.

Because his music teacher has taught him to identify a number of instruments, I decided to play Peter and the Wolf  for him―the classic young person’s introduction to the orchestra. At first, I played Sir John Gielgud narrating it. I thought they would show each instrument as it played. Nope. So I switched to the classic Disney Peter and the Wolf, which showed the instruments briefly, then showed the story. As soon as the wolf swallowed the duck, you knew it was alive because that’s what happened in Red Riding Hood.

My grandson has already noticed I repeat my stories, such that when I start one he’s heard before, he says, “I already know that Abba.”

The same goes with grammar and vocabulary. We were talking about Sally Snake and Trip Triceratops (and all his other stuffed animals, all of which get obvious names) and I mentioned they involved alliteration, which I started to describe.

“You’ve told me that 52 times,” he said, with a specificity that I don’t think I deserve and may be an exaggeration.

I know this phase will pass, and that in the meantime it is hard on my daughter, but… when my granddaughter either doesn’t feel like getting dressed, eating, or calming down, one pretty much guaranteed solution is a video call with Abba (me, grandfather). She doesn’t usually have much to say; just wants to see me. Still, when we are together in person, she stays on my lap for about 15 seconds or so.