“If you’ll be my bodyguard/I can be your long lost pal /I can call you Betty/And Betty when you call me/You can call me Al. /Call me Al.”
Remember those lyrics by Paul Simon? It was a funny song about a not-so-funny situation, describing a man experiencing a midlife crisis: (“Where’s my wife and family? What if I die here? Who’ll be my role model?”). Paul Simon says the names in the song came from an incident at a party that Simon attended with his then-wife Peggy. One of the guests at the party mistakenly referred to Paul as “Al” and to Peggy as “Betty,” inspiring Simon to write the song.
The song became extremely popular after Paul Simon and Chevy Chase did it on Saturday Night Live. (You can find it on Youtube.) And the song led to a popularization of the catch-phrase “Call Me Al.” It got me thinking about what we call each other.
And I recently read Tim Russert’s book, “Wisdom of Our Fathers/Lessons and Letters from Daughters and Sons,” a moving compilation of letters and emails selected from among nearly 60,000 that Russert received from readers in response to his earlier book about his father, “Big Russ and Me.” The letters cover all types of fathers and families — some humorous, some difficult, and some absolutely heart-warming — but all teaching us how our fathers can speak wisdom to our minds and souls.
In the book, writers refer to their fathers by a variety of names: Dad, Pop, Pops, Poppa, PaPa, BaBa, Father, my old man, etc.
Jimmy Fallon, host of the “Tonight Show,” is “Dada” to two little girls, Winnie (2) and Frannie (about 6 months), and he has a hit with a new children’s book, “Your Baby’s First Word Will Be Dada.” It’s a picture book with a simple story about animals trying to get their kids to say “Dada.” When he says “Dada” to his calf, he gets “Moo” back from Junior; the ram gets “Baa”; the drake gets “Quack”; etc.
Makes you wonder if his girls said “Dada” before they said “Mama,” right?
I read an article that advised women not to take offense if their babies say “Dada” first because 99.9 percent of them do. That seems pretty high to me. But I’m pretty sure all of our kids said “Mama” before they said “Dada.” I read another article in which a pediatrician said that he’d had only one patient in his practice whose baby said “mama” first, and that was because the woman named the bottle “mama” so the baby, reaching for the bottle, would say “mama, mama.”
Why do babies call their fathers “Dada” or “Daddy” anyway? And it’s not just in English, either; Dada is common in many cultures all over the world, but its origin is difficult to trace, and the word seems to have occurred independently in many languages.“Dad” was first recorded in English sometime in the 1500s, but its ancestry isn’t clear. Even the Oxford English Dictionary throws its hands up and admits “of the actual origin we have no evidence.” But most linguists think it originates in infantile speech.
Three of our sons call me “Dad,” one calls me “Pop,” and our late daughter, Jill, always called me “Daddy.” They all called me Daddy when they were little, but she continued until the day she died. I’ll always treasure that.
But as the old saying goes, “I don’t care what you call me, as long as you call me.” You can call me Al!
