Dot Wordsworth

Because I said so

issue 10 December 2011

‘Because I said so’ is the most common phrase mothers find themselves using to their children that their own mothers used to them, according to a deeply unscientific survey undertaken by a baby-outfitters.

Other such phrases included: ‘Take your coat off or you won’t feel the benefit’; ‘Wait and see’; and ‘Were you born in a barn?’ (which the survey renders as: ‘You weren’t born in a barn’ — not the version familiar to me). I was delighted by the old-fashioned ‘Who is “she”, the cat’s mother?’ It benefits from logical obscurity. The child, after all, knows that there is such a pronoun as she. But the grammar is not criticised, rather the register of speech.

These retorts to children belong to what Basil Bernstein, the sociologist, called the ‘restricted code’. This was seized upon by Mary Douglas, the great anthropologist, as elucidating the store of implicit meaning in everyday behaviour.

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