You know what’s funny? Language. Don’t you think? (Stay with me, here.) Isn’t it funny how a word can mean one thing for a while, a long long long while even, and then through some mechanism I don’t fully understand, it comes to mean something else entirely in popular usage? Funny.

Do you know what word no one ever uses to mean “cat” anymore? I bet you do. But you know where it’s still used to mean “pet of the feline variety”? Not-recently-published children’s books. And so it is that my kids think it means cat. Just cat.

Which led to this afternoon’s what-do-I-do parenting moment, when the children were playing in the backyard and decided to round up a troupe of imaginary cats and herd them into an imaginary barn. We have the kind of backyard fences you can look over to say hello. I am okay with “hello,” but not so hot on “what the [bleep]’s going on over there,” so I thought probably I should put an end to the cat-corralling.

I thought that might be our only linguistically-induced mishap of the day, until I sat down to read The BFG out loud this evening. Perhaps you don’t quite remember the giants of The BFG. Their grammar is a little peculiar, but their vocabulary is scrumdiddlyumptious. Also sometimes cannybully and murderful (these are mostly human-eating giants, after all). They have their own special phraseology, one might say. For example, the word for a cave. A cave where a giant might live. A cave where a giant might be hiding his human friend. Another giant, suspecting him of harboring a tasty human, might accuse him of having “snitched a human bean and brought it back to your bunghole as a pet.” For example.

I may need to invest in books written in the last decade.