I'm sorry for my views, I must have been confused...

When common decency to other people proscribes real honesty, it's a jolly good thing that other people can say it for you.

Oh My Giddy Aunt

There's an older post here somewhere, where I was blibbering on about how I'd surprised myself, after embedding a plug in my foot, with my capacity for swear words .

But something else happened today. My 3-year-old is at the stage where she externally exudes a delightful innocence while at the same time seething internally with mischief. She has also realised that a wide-eyed, pink-cheeked expression of ingenuousness can pull the wool over most people's eyes and allow her, on those occasions, to get away with what she wants. My dad is a regular victim of this, but while he relaxes in Australia, she has been looking for new prey.

So. Today we went to meet a new music teacher (and before it sounds too Surrey for words - the idea of taking a 3-year-old to a music teacher - I must say there IS a story behind it but it's too involved to blog). Anyway. This lovely lady was all friendliness and enthusiasm and J responded in a similar way. Together they played some notes and clapped rhythms, we all smiled and everything was well.

And then I saw it - a slight flicker, in a very wide eye.

"Now duckie, " said Nice Music Teacher "We're going to sing your name. I shall sing "What-oh-what-is-YOUR-name? "(C, C, C, C, Eeeee, C) and YOU shall reply "My name is J - ". My 3 year old nodded her plaits very enthusiastically and was rewarded with the most indulgent of smiles. Which she returned, just a little bit too sweetly.

Off they went. Nice Teacher played an accompanying chord and sang her line. J lifted up her face, and sang, prettily, rhythmically, musically and all:

"My Name is Stink-Arse".

Stink-arse? STINK-ARSE?

Why, why, WHY and where, where, WHERE?! I can't blame her brother, he' s only 4. I won't blame me, not for that one. 'B*gger', yes; I do say that, but stink-arse?

I have never heard anyone say Stink-Arse.

So why, then? Why that? Why couldn't she have said Jelly-Head? Fizzy-Boots? Or Yum-Yum? Even Stink BUM would have been better, in comparison. But please not 'arse'.

It got me thinking though. Every language, every patois, every tiny geographical dialect has its share of curse words, and it's hardly a surprise that studies also show that verboten lexis globally is pretty much as easily categorised into the religious, the visceral (or scatological) and the social as in English. We swear for solidarity, or to offend, to shock, to release tension and show aggression, and these three areas hold enough taboo to make it possible. Logical all round.

However, what I have found out this afternoon is that swearing is not just a case of uncontrolled utterance. As far as our brains are concerned, expletives can be an amalgam of spontaneity and deliberation. Even in what may feel like an uncontrolled outburst of Naughty Words, we do apparently still make conscious decision on the choice of our language, after a split second assessment of the situation.

I also learnt this. While the left hemisphere of the brain is in charge of language, the right part runs emotional linguistic content. That I knew. However, apparently, the lower part of the brain manages swearing, along with instinctive emotion, and it is an activity which involves both the limbic system (behaviour, emotion and memory) and the basal ganglia (motor functions, impulse control). But this is where it gets interesting. It seems, from my very basic and interrupted reading (was also simultaneously doing a Meccano Robot, and making fishcakes for tea) that the brain stores swear words as complete lexical units, rather than singular, combinable phonemes. That I didn't know.

So my 3 year old is just repeating, I asked my Clever Former Colleague who can still sit in his office surrounded by books, by dint of having a wife who does the childcare.

"Young children will always remember illicit language, long before they truly comprehend the meaning" he assured me. "Curse words are more memorable, and studies consistently show that in any language, taboo words given in a list of randoms will be remembered first. If you write the word 'cat' in pink and ask someone to read the colour not the word, they will do it. Use a swear word, and it is more difficult. It's the way we are wired."

So if a Generation Game-type conveyor belt passes us full of words, some of them naughty, it's the latter we'll be taking home?

"It's not a very academic example, " he said politely, after a long pause "but, I think, yes." And for the first time, he didn't ask me if I was planning to return to work.

Thank goodness for that, then. My daughter was not conjuring horrid images in her head to verbalise in an attempt to shock. She was just repeating, probably uncomprehendingly, something she'd heard.

Which, however, still begs the question. WHERE had she heard that?

I have my suspicions and I shall be Miss Marple in my quest to find out...

Being more expert on Burkina Faso than the day before.

It took me an hour and a half to get round the supermarket and buy pumpkin pie ingredients for R yesterday. Mostly because I spent the main part of this time sitting on the bonnet of my car talking to the lovely man who had offered to wash it.

I always think that everyone has a story and the most fascinating tales come to you when you least expect it. He walked up to me and said "Excuse me, lady, but THAT baby needs a wash" and proceeded to pick at the great globule of windscreen bird muck with his fingernail. I shrieked with prissiness and tried to find him a wetwipe. He laughed back at me. "Lady, " he said "I am from Burkina Faso. We don't worry about such things there."

I was immediately hooked. "Burkina Faso?"

He grinned. "I bet you don't know where it is".

I have pride, even in a supermarket car park near Staines. I told him I knew exactly where it was, that it rubbed its landlocked borders with Mali and Niger, and Ghana and Togo (I swallowed that last one a bit as I wasn't sure - I always mix up Togo with Benin, ignorantly. Having looked at the map now, I can see it's both, anyway). I said it used to be called Upper Volta, had been nabbed by the French, and it's capital was Ouagadougu and I sat down on the bonnet and waited for him to be impressed.

He wasn't. He laughed again. "Not Ouagadougu," he chuckled. "OuagaDOUgu".

It did sound better when he said it. And I thought mine was close but he shook his head and said "No, no, terrible", though very amiably. But he did come and lean against the bonnet and we started talking. About Burkina Faso and what it was like. And I learnt absolutely loads.

He told me how Burkina Faso's neighbours all envy her for her organisation, palm wine and film festival. He told me Burkinabe are relaxed happy people who like to read and tell stories. He took me through the transition from independence to today's regime semi-presidentiel, (sorry, can't find acute accents in this format) and that Burkina Faso means "A Country of Honest People". He told me his favourite dish was a mix of rice, okra and peanut sauce and his Mum made it best. And that 200 000 are still homeless from the summer flooding. And that just after his grandfather had died, his apparition had appeared at his neighbour's house, floated round the dinner table wagging its ghostly finger and scolded him, in front of his family, for having had an affair. And then he sang the anthem for me. Une Seule Nuit. I'd never heard it before.

It is amazing how the most interesting moments come flying at you when you least expect them. I got pretty much the whole shop done in a wonderfully smoky daydream of Burkina Faso and without the tiniest shred of Shopper's Impatience.

One can learn much in Sainsbury's car park on Saturday afternoon. Who'd have thought it?

He also pointed me towards this. I have no idea what it's about, but I'm imagining it might be something to do with getting plastered? Odd, but vaguely compelling.



After-afterthought...
Although one more thing - how awful that so many people have lost everything in one tiny country and the thought of it has barely crept into my mind. THAT was badly done, Emma. Badly done indeed.