Well, I might be over-analysing it,but the song is about the relationship between an absent father and a son, and the payoff at the end is that he won't do the same to his son - by calling him a boy's name, he will be breaking the cycle of 'toughening' that goes between father and son (a kind of soft metaphor for abuse, or at least emotional distance) and realises that you can prepare your son for the world in a gentler way.
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The Alchemist king of the needlessly complicated,
Fri 19 Jun 2009, 13:23,
archived)