Still, I’m aware that being a father is just as hard as being a mother. Especially when your kids start talking.

THE HORROR OF DADDY’S SPECIAL LEMONADE

I was sitting at the kitchen table last week, flicking through the newspapers, and observing just how many confusing and/or alarming things I could absorb before breakfast. Here was the news that David Cameron is apparently taking “anti-posh” lessons—surely an ill-advised move in the middle of an election campaign, given that, were it successful, the Conservative Party would be left with little more than a pair of trousers, and a name-tag reading “Dave.”

On the next page, another mention of how the Mayans believed the world would end in 2012—a theory which is now beginning to rattle me quite badly. What, I panic, in the name of Moses, is going to go down at the London Olympics? How badly wrong can an opening ceremony featuring Paul McCartney, David Beckham and Stomp go? The only thing that could possibly make the End of Days worse is knowing that its epicenter was in Stratford, and that all the disruption of building the East London Line had been a complete waste of time, after all.

But then I turned the page and saw a picture of convicted pedophile Sidney Cooke, and felt suddenly and enormously reassured.

Now he really does look like a pedophile, I thought to myself happily. No doubt about that. He’s a classic beast. He looks like he’s from some putative Deviant Central Casting Agency. If I saw him in a playground, I thought, there would be no doubt or uncertainty. I would be evacuating the swings immediately. So long as there are pedophiles who look as obviously up to no good as Cooke, there is less confusion and worry in the world. He has that certain, unmistakable, alarming “something” that sets the nerves jangling. Thank God for Cooke.

I turned the page in the newspaper, finally feeling more relaxed about the world.

But of course, that certain, alarming “something” is not just restricted to things that actually warrant alarm. Sometimes, we are alarmed by things that shouldn’t really be alarming at all.

I was given cause to reflect on this the next day, when we had some friends over. Lizzie greeted them in the hallway.

“I’ve been helping Daddy make his Special Lemonade!” she said, brightly. My husband does, indeed, make very good lemonade. As lemonades go, it really is quite special. But as I caught the momentary quizzical looks of my friends, I realized that the phrase “Daddy’s Special Lemonade” has a certain . . . dubious quality to it.

“I love Daddy’s Special Lemonade!” Lizzie continued, cheerfully, as we all went into the kitchen. The situation started to feel bad.

“It’s got limes in it,” I said, briskly. My husband, however, had already noticed the glances.

“Oh, I wish I’d never called it that.” He sighed, pouring lemonade out into glasses. “Daddy’s Special Lemonade was a bad idea. It’s like that tickle thing, all over again.”

The “tickle thing” was an unfortunate incident a couple of years ago, when we had to leave a playground after a very young Lizzie shouted, “Daddy! Tickle me in my special place!”

As it happens, her “special place” was a particularly ticklish spot under her chin—but the looks on the other parents in the playground suggested they did not believe this to be the case. We actually never went back to that playground again—which was a shame, as there was particularly good mobile reception there, and I used to read all my emails while she was on the slide.

It is a sad fact that, over the last few years, both “special” and “Daddy” have taken on a slight tinge of . . . unsavoriness. Menace. Perhaps it’s the racks of misery memoirs that have them in the title—Please Daddy, No; What Daddy Did; Daddy’s Special Girl—but two ostensibly benign words are becoming loaded with unhappy inference. To the point that, when I see a greeting card with “To a Special Daddy” on the front, I can barely repress a shudder. A Special Daddy? A Special Daddy must be the very worst. That’s some seriously gnarly ominousness. What manner of monster is Hallmark catering to?

As things stand, at this point in the twenty-first century, we’re on the verge of losing our innocence toward words “daddy” and “special.” I feel like homophobic bigots must have felt in the 1970s, as they watched the word “gay” slip from their vocabulary.

Lexical tectonic plates are shifting. Special Branch, the Special Olympics, the Specials, Special K—all will have to be renamed, as the word shifts from “something unique and significant” to “a terrible traumatic secret, such as would be a major plotline development in General Hospital.” As a consequence, the words “specialization” and “specialist” will sound little better than an outright admission of having studied evil at the PhD level.

As for Daddy’s Special Lemonade—we’ve told Lizzie to refer to it as Lime Surprise from now on. As a matter of some urgency.