Recent events have got me thinking about how UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson resembles Charlie Drake.

Well, at least one of them’s a clown.

The last line of the first verse of this 1958 UK hit for Drake certainly links them.

“Well how was I to know there was a party going on?”

Charlie Drake: Splish Splash

(I know there was an earlier version by Bobby Darin but I don’t think it made the British charts.)

A beautiful song written by the singer here. It wasn’t a hit for him in the UK but it was for the Four Tops (see here) and Bobby Darin.

I of course applaud the use of the conditional in the title and in each of the verses.

Tim Hardin: If I Were a Carpenter

In the early 1960s it seemed that all you needed to be a successful North American male singer was to be called Bobby. Bobby Darin, Bobby Vee, Bobby Rydell all had hits then. The middle one of those, Bobby Vee, died this week.

Singer of the outrageously catchy Rubber Ball, and teen ballads like More Than I Can Say and Run to Him, the admonitory The Night has a Thousand Eyes and the yearning Take Good Care of My Baby, Vee’s star fell along with that style of recording once the Beatles came along.

Take Good Care of my Baby was a typically breezy sounding song written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King with an attendant less than breezy lyric. Note those plucked strings fixing its vintage.

Bobby Vee: Take Good Care of My Baby

Robert Thomas Velline (Bobby Vee): 30/4/1943–24/10/2016. So it goes.

I heard young Tom Daley, the Olympic diver, use the expression “times it by”€ in a TV interview after his event.

Times it by? Times it by?

What superannuated numpty taught him this phrase?

Why employ it at all when there is a perfectly usable adult word, the proper mathematical term, which someone of 14 years of age – hell half that – ought to have no problems in using if they had been told it properly in the first place?

I assume the thinking process behind employing this horrible construction is that “multiply” is too complicated a word for children to cope with.
But why is it necessary to talk down to children in this way?
Does it really make the manipulation (sorry, I used a five syllable word there; I of course meant times-it-bying, only four syllables after all) easier for a child to understand by describing it in a childish way?

I know we refer to times tables, but the process is not called timesing, is it? (See how ugly this becomes?)

In any case it might be better to say, for example, 4 lots of 6 make 24, or four multiples of 6 give you 24, rather than 4 times 6 is 24.

Even if “times it by” were generated by children themselves they ought to have been told, “We don’t say that. We say multiply instead,” in much the same way you would correct a child who said buyed in place of bought.

Think how different phraseology would have been if this ugly usage had always been in vogue.

Be fruitful and times-it-by; and replenish the Earth? Hardly trips off the tongue.

Bobby Darin got it correct.

Multiplication. That’s the name of the game.

Bobby Darin: Multiplication