YER DA. I have to confess I laughed the first few times I heard the expression. It’s usually deployed against middle-aged, white, right-wing men banging on about political correctness. The type of guy who drives me up the wall.

The insult is uniquely Scottish, both in its sound and dialect, and its intention to skewer someone with stiletto precision. It’s also ubiquitous – just search social media to see it dealt out in droves to red-faced reactionaries, who in England would be called ‘a gammon’.

But there was always an itch in the back of my mind when I heard the put-down, that I was laughing at a joke which wasn’t quite right – which was more damaging than it was constructive.

The central problem with the jibe ‘yer da’ is that it’s using something which should be seen as a force for good – fatherhood – as a vehicle for attacking something that’s bad: the angry, controlling, illogical and domineering voice of a male authority which is presumed not earned. The joke essentially equates fatherhood with Trumpianism.

Fatherhood may have been about control and domination throughout much of human history, but for decades most decent men have been trying to change the definition and the image to one that’s about caring, nurturing, love and kindness. Many, many men are uncomfortable with the stereotype that masculinity is about stiff upper lips, and not showing your feelings, and endless Darwinian competition, or that fatherhood is only about discipline, that ‘wait till your father gets home’ nonsense. Certainly, I’ve been deeply opposed to those phoney and damaging tropes my entire life.

Being a father has been the most important part of my existence. Both my children were unplanned – happy accidents – and fatherhood took me by surprise, but the change it wrought on me was immense. I suddenly found myself transformed through the experience of having children. My bad edges were knocked off and there was no time for selfishness or laziness. A side of me I had always wanted to blossom, blossomed. I found meaning in feeding and singing to a baby, in changing nappies and wiping up puke. I felt more of my real humanity emerge while reading bedtime stories, giving baths, and drying tears than I had at any other moment I’d experienced.

You could pile up my so-called achievements in life – awards, books, degrees, whatever signs of professional success people use to judge themselves by – and burn them in my garden and I wouldn’t care, so long as you allowed me to say that I’d been the best father I could to my two daughters.

Not long ago, a male friend, who’s also a journalist, wrote a piece which was seen as a little populist. On social media, he started to be referred to as ‘yer da’. I’ve known this man many years and the one thing I can say for sure about him is that he’s a great father. He loves his children, and has given them all the emotional support and guidance he had to give. That’s enough to make him a good man in my eyes, regardless of what he may or may not believe politically.

So here was a good and decent father being insulted and the insult used to hurt him was fatherhood itself. We’d never do this with motherhood.

If we want men – all men – to change; if we want to purge toxic masculinity, eliminate all those hangovers from the Bronze Age to the Victorian era and the 1950s; if we just want men to be better, then for the love of God, I thought to myself, stop denigrating fatherhood. Fatherhood is the route to a man being a better man.

This summer I found myself thinking long and hard about my role as a father. My two daughters both graduated from university in July, and I spent a lot of time with their two boyfriends over the summer months – two fine young men who it looks likely my daughters may one day settle down with, and forge families of their own.

Their graduations marked the end of one part of fatherhood and the beginning of another. The so-called hard work was done. My wife and I had got our children to adulthood, seen them educated, and hopefully raised them as happy young women ready to go off into the world on their own. Part of me felt elated that we’d succeeded. Part of me felt bereft, as I know this leads to the moment when my daughters leave the family home, and I will be very sad without them every day.

Their boyfriends, the young men they will likely move into new houses with soon, also represent a change for me, a time for me to step back a little. Once again, I’m one part joyful, one part tearful. If you’ve defined yourself by your love of fatherhood, an empty nest can be a frightening thing to contemplate.

So, the idea of fatherhood being used as a weapon to insult, saddens me. We should be celebrating the gift of fatherhood, not laughing at it. When I was a teenager growing up in Ireland in the 1980s, the insult ‘yer ma’ was common. It came as an implicit sexualised slur. No-one uses that expression anymore. It’s base, pathetic, sexist. No-one uses the word ‘gay’ as a insult anymore, thank God. Motherhood and an individual’s sexuality are things to celebrate, not denounce. But still – fathers are fair game.

I’m not saying don’t use the expression ‘yer da’ – feel free. Do what you like. There will be no demands of the patriarchy from me. But I would say that if you wish to make the world a better place, and men better people, then be careful of the words you use and the ideas you deploy when you want to take a pop at some idiot guy who deserves it.

Now, of course, the irony for me writing this column is that in the era of offence, someone will not like what I am saying, and given my age and my race, though not my political inclination, I am surely ripe for the ‘yer da’ treatment. Go ahead. Call me it. I reclaim the words. Being a da is what I am.

Neil Mackay is Scotland's Columnist of the Year