‘Forfookinsake,’ my son says, under his breath and not for the first time. He started saying this after a nine-hour drive from Holyhead to London this summer, during which I may have uttered a similar phrase several times while trying to get his baby sister to stop being violently car sick.
His odd pronunciation of said phrase is partly due to his lack of profane vocabulary and partly his deep-seeded English need to mock the boggy diction of his parents’ accents. My tongue probably does swing a little closer to my roots when my mind is clouded with anger, but it doesn’t help to be reminded of this from the unblemished lips of my five-year-old son.
