I remember my father driving in the car, fumbling with the lyrics to an untold number of songs. I have been known on occasion to do the same, though usually late at night when I am driving, no one else is awake or riding with me, and I am trying to stay awake. It appears that my son, the tank, has inherited this predisposition as well, though amplified a million times over because of his astounding lack of vocabulary.

I am walking back from the kitchen toward my office (I live in a thimble, so it’s not much of a walk so much as a step) when I hear the discordant strumming of my husband’s bass guitar. Standing in the doorway, I am treated to the scene of my five year old son banging on the strings of the guitar in it’s upright stand, jazz musician style. He is singing with feeling at the top of his lungs and while I recognize the melody of the song he’s singing, none of the words make any kind of sense.

Because I am a control freak pedant at heart, I proceed to try to teach my son the words to the song, which is one of my favorite Fiction Plane songs. The refrain from the song is “This is the shadow / of life lying fallow / despairing can’t find it’s place here.” Now, I don’t know what language my son was speaking, but those were not the words that came out of his mouth. When I repeated the correct words for him, however, both he and my husband looked at me as if I had grown a second purple head out of the side of my neck. lunasdad actually laughed and said “he’s five, he isn’t going to remember that.”

But why not? The kid is like an elephant the rest of the time, remembering that I promised to give him a toy after we got back from the supermarket, that at 6pm he was supposed to do his homework, and that I said he could have an hour each of computer time and tv time. The kid is a pro at parroting back to me Things I Wish I Had Not Promised, surely he can remember the chorus to one of his own favorite songs. He can carry the tune just fine, and explain to you the difference between a quarter note and a half note. Hell, he’s even a fair hand at drawing them.

I started thinking about it then. How do kids build vocabulary if not by reusing words they hear in their environment? Who’s to say that a five year old cannot grasp the concept of the word fallow or despair? Why not teach him the meaning of these words? It might be nice if he understood to a certain degree what he’s singing about, or at least the importance of NOT singing or saying words he doesn’t understand (“Hey, what did you just say?” “I was just sayin’ fuckin’ shit!” “Do you know what that means?” “No.” “Then you probably shouldn’t say it.” “OK.” Lather, rinse, repeat.).

Alas, this all presumes that the child cares he’s not singing the right words. In this case, the tank was perfectly happy singing his own rendition of the song and could have lived quite happily without ever having the word “fallow” explained to him. I’ve learned an important lesson too, which is really that if a kid is happy and he’s not hurting anyone, just let him keep on trucking. It’s easier to live without the second purple head. *sigh*