dad

   It cannot be known for certain when this word came into regular use, but it is recorded from the sixteenth century. From that point on, at least, it can be regarded as a piece of fossilized babylanguage, used by children of any age to address their father. The word occurs rarely in Shakespeare’s plays. In King John Philip the Bastard, natural son of Richard I, makes the rather complicated statement: ‘I was never so bethump’d with words/Since I first call’d my brother’s father dad.’ His brother is in fact his half-brother, Robert Faulcon-bridge. In modern times ‘Dad’ is generally used, though middle class families will tend to discourage it in favour of ‘Father’ or, in very traditional American circles, ‘sir’. In Don’t Tell Alfred, by Nancy Mitford, there is the comment: ‘I wouldn’t mind the boys calling me Dad,’ said Alfred (who did mind, however, and had made great efforts, successful with David and Baz, to be called Father), ‘if only they wouldn’t pronounce it Dud.’ The father in this case is decidedly upper middle-class, and the dud pronunciation an idiosyncratic one. ‘Dad’ is sometimes used to the speaker’s father-in-law, but there is certainly no general rule about such usage. It may also be extended to step-fathers, although a group of British children interviewed by The Observer newspaper in June, 1988, all of whom had stepfathers, made comments such as: ‘I couldn’t call him Dad’ and ‘I’ve almost called my stepdad Dad once…then you feel really weird.’ In The Liberty Man, by Gillian Freeman, a working-class wife calls her husband ‘Dad’. ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’ are certainly used by wives and husbands who are parents, especially when the children are present. There is a non-family use of ‘Dad’, typically by young working-class speakers, to an unrelated older man which is often slightly contemptuous or decidedly aggressive. Other father terms used to a stranger, such as ‘Pop’ or the extended ‘Daddy-o’, are for some reason more friendly. In Chuck, by Carl Sterland, there is a horribly contrived incident where a young man says to an older one: ‘Well, dad, how was it?’ The man addressed chokes into his brandy and says: You startled me. Why the “dad” by the way? ‘Just an expression,’ replies the young man. The point of all this is that the older man really is the father of the young man, though the latter was adopted at birth and does not know that his natural father has come to seek him out.