Private Thoughts Made Public

My son has definately got a brain in his head. And he likes to put it to use, as well. He loves puzzles, and word games. I’ve been playing old adventure games with him on the computer recently, and although we don’t spend a lot of time working out the puzzles (they are all old games to which I know the solutions) he’ll sit on my lap for hours watching what I do and throwing in his two-pennorth occasionally. So far we’ve played The Neverhood (three times), Curse of Monkey Island (twice), Myst (once) and Riven (almost finished). What really impresses me is that when we go back to a game a few weeks later, he remembers how most of the puzzles work. Myst and Riven have really captured his imagination. They are full of magic “linking books” (a book you can use to travel to another world by jumping into a picture on the first page, much like Dick Van Dyke’s pavement cartoonist jumped into his pictures in Mary Poppins), good guys, bad guys, fantastic scenery and animations, and he really immerses himself in the fantasy worlds he sees on the screen. Hopefully this sort of thing will stand him in good stead for logical thinking and creative imagination as he grows older. Either that or he’ll bury his head in a PlayStation and not come out until the acne has cleared up.
I’m also blown away by his word power, and the way that he thinks about words. Even from a very young age (and don’t forget he’s still only five) he was aware of the effect of swapping one word for another (“Baa baa black sheep, have you any chocolate”). Recently we were playing some word games in the car. I asked him to think of some words beginning with “O”. The first word he came up with was “orange”. Fair enough. The second was “oxygen”. Now where the hell did that one come from? I told him about anagrams, and illustrated the idea with some examples: rat, tar, art. Then I asked him if he knew what the shortest anagram in the English language was. I gave him the start word (“on”) and after a few seconds he came up with the right answer. Pretty impressive, I thought. He thinks about the end of one words (or phrase) and the start of the next. He comes out with things like “cheesandwich” or “windowasher”. After all, if the next word starts with the same letter as the last one, what’s the point of saying the letter twice? As far as phrases go, he’s come up with “run fast asleep” and “thank-u-cumber” amongst others. If he carries on like this he’ll be a proficient blogger by the time he’s 10 and a published author by the time he’s 15. Hopefully!
But the more he explores language and words, the more I realise just how difficult English is. The other day he picked up a piece of paper and said: “L-O-O-T….. that spells lot”. I corrected him, saying that the word was “loot”, and that if you have two “o”‘s together that’s the sound they make. Then I realised they don’t always make that sound. Door, moon and book all sound different (at least with my accent they do). So how can I tell him that it’s correct in one case but wrong in another? And what about cough, bough, thorough and through? How can I explain that “bow” sounds one way when you’re talking about a bow and arrow, and a completely different way when you’re talking about the bow of a ship?
Dads are supposed to have all the answers. I’m rapidly realising that the older I get, the less I know.