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Don’t read the rest of this post if you’re offended by the word for boys’ private parts. And I don’t mean “Eeeew!”

From the moment boys start getting the hang of language, until they’re about 90, they seem to apply a large amount of their language skill to an ongoing discourse about penises. In particular, who has them and who doesn’t.

A friend was at breakfast her husband and two (boy) children when Mr Four said “Don’t worry mummy. One day you’ll grow a penis.”

There is also the challenge of learning when is it appropriate to discuss penises, and what the tone of conversation should be if you’re not, for instance, a consulting urologist.

Once at a large public event my three year old son and I queued for 10 minutes to get into a stall in the mens’ toilets. There were probably a dozen men waiting in the reverent quiet and eye-contact-free space that is usual for men’s public toilets. Mr Four finally got to sit on the toilet and at the top of his conversational voice decided he’d start a conversation about penises with a loud and impressed-sounding “You’ve got a really big penis!”

Reverent quiet suddenly became reverent silence.

Then there’s relative anatomy.

One day in the bathroom Mr Three turned to my wife and said, “You don’t have a penis do you?”

“No, women and girls don’t have penises. They have Vag…”

“Vagiant penises!”

I guess it can only get stranger from here.