Because I said so

‘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. A well-meaning middle-class parent might explain why it is rude to stare – it might hurt someone’s feelings, and you wouldn’t like it if your feelings were hurt, would you? That is an elaborated code. A working-class parent, unreflecting in the security of her hierarchical family, so the thinking went, would say ‘Don’t stare’ and if asked why, would reply, ‘Because I said so.’ This does not give the reason, but refers to the system of relationships that gives the command its force. Similarly, ‘Were you born in a barn?’ does not elicit information, but is an instruction formulated in a proverbial way.

Obscurity is no obstacle in such retorts. If a child asks what is for dinner, the parent’s reply might be ‘Wait and see’, but my grandmother’s stock response was: ‘Bread and pull it.’ It did not matter whether the child saw the word-play (on ‘pullet’, geddit?).