Inevitable at many family gatherings are the stories about two to four-year-old speech, either mangled words, or made-up words as the child struggles to express thoughts obviously going on inside their heads. This can sometimes be deadly if it either strays into the “Oh how cute” zone—wherein love fuels about 90% of the fun factor, like “Our Little Bit says bafwoomb instead of bathroom. Isn’t that precious?”—or into the Family Olympic Competition zone, usually signaled by the warning cry of “My kids are just so brilliant!” anecdote that inevitably unleashes a cascade of similar anecdotes, everyone marking time until the last speaker pauses to take a breath so they can jump in and unload their Little Bit’s latest proof of future brilliance.
But sometimes these kinds of exchanges of stories are both fun and enlightening. The ones I love are the kid-invented words that show how their minds work, or the oddities of kid communication that aren’t easily explained away by soft palate development. Like the two-year-old who was just beginning to talk, and made a clear distinction between “babies” and “beings.” To the adults, the two terms appeared at first to include every human under the age of six months. But the toddler was persistent in two separate terms, though, because she was two, she couldn’t articulate the difference. Yet a difference she perceived, quite stubbornly. “That’s a baby.” “Is this one a baby?” “No, that’s a being.” “Is this one over here a baby or a being?” “Baby.” Within a year, when she had more vocabulary, she stopped differentiating babies and beings, so the adults never did find out what was going on in her head.
Then there are terms that you wouldn’t think of but make sense. Like a former neighbor’s three-year-old who warned my kid not to touch a fragile crystal statuette, before the other adults in the room could leap up. “Don’t touch! That’s glassible.” Glassible. What a great term. Of course by the time that kid was in kindergarten her language had been guided into conventional channels, and she’d forgotten about glassible. But that one has stuck with me for nearly thirty years.
The ones I like best are family words. Like when I was young, there was my grandmother’s word munket. Munketing was rubbing something against your upper lip. Usually something soft, like the silk edging on blankets, but it could be anything. Back in the germ-anxious fifties, this was a terrible thing; I remember getting landed on at the San Diego zoo because the steel rail was exactly at my face level. I couldn’t see much, so I started munketing, rubbing my upper lip over the smooth, cool steel, until my grandmother shrieked with fear about all the germs I was taking aboard.
I asked my grandmother a couple years back if she remembered where she got the word munket but she didn’t remember ever using it. I guess when we kids grew out of this horrific behavior, the word vanished from family use.
Finally, there is the social baggage that goes with words, even if misunderstood. When you’re a teacher, you become hyper-aware of the ages at which perfectly harmless words begin to take on extra meanings. “Why do I teach second grade?” a fellow instructor once said at a faculty meeting. “Because if the word for a semiaquatic rodent with webbed feet and a broad flat tail comes up in the text we just go happily on. I don’t have to lose five minutes getting them under control again, like you junior high teachers must.”
She was right. There was a list of perfectly good words we tiptoed around, because none of us were those stern-browed, awe-inspiring teachers whose laser glance could kill a giggle at fifty paces.
But no matter how careful you were, you could always be taken by surprise. Like the time I was dictating new vocabulary to a class of sixth graders. When I got to the word “Prostrate” the trio of boys to my left all twitched, their countenances stiffening into the expression midway between bug-eyed and looking stuffed that boys get when just barely controlling a hysterical outbreak of laughter. It wasn’t until I said gently “Definition: lying face down on the floor or ground,” that all three young faces instantly cleared to disinterest, and the lesson returned to its accustomed daily tread.
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I never will forget wrestling with one batch of sophisticated fifth grade boys over “Brown’s Hole.” We were working on remedial reading, and the group was reading An Outlaw Thanksgiving. Very sweet book, really…except that this particular group of kids had to giggle and make cracks about “Brown’s Hole.”
No other group has been that way about it, before or since. And that particular cohort is still that way, even at a few years older.
Ohhhh yes. Once a group gets hold of something like that, they can stick to it for years.
Munket is a lovely word for a particular activity that would need a sentence to explain otherwise.
For a while in our family we had a similar word which was wabonding. (With a short “a” like in “rabbit” and stress on the first syllable.)
This described the action of rubbing something with one’s forehead, like cats do. Our daughter invented the word when she was a toddler. I have no idea where it came from, but she was very precise about what it meant.
Sherwood, I love the words you shared. Glassible is a perfect combination of glass and breakable, because what child hasn’t been told repeatedly, “That’s glass! It’s fragile/breakable! Don’t touch it!” Munket’s wonderful because it is a word that condenses an idea down to one word rather than an explanation. And I’d love to know where the babies/beings distinction was too.
Helen, wabonding sounds somewhat similar to rub on, turned into a verb as a unit rather than with the “ing” coming after the rub part. It makes linguistic sense, in terms of the way a young child’s brain functions. When they get to a certain stage, they conjugate made up verbs just as well as ones they’ve heard used, because they understand the way the language works. Her word sounds like the cusp of that stage, which makes it even more interesting. She could have made up the word entirely from scratch, or subconsciously based it on the phrase, or understood verb conjugation to a degree but not known where the “ing” went. Thanks for sharing your story, I enjoyed it.
Tri: that’s what I was wondering about wabonding, if the ‘wa’ came from ‘rub’ but whatever, it’s a wonderful word.
I never used to correct my children’s language, partly because I remembered distinctly how irritating it was to have the flow of though splintered because you hadn’t said this or that word correctly, it was as if the adults were listening for error, and not for meaning. (Never mind that I, the world’s worst blabbermouth, was unlikely to have been uttering anything worth hearing.)
But the second thing was, I got a deep, secret pleasure in the evidence of how my kids’ minds worked, before the idiosyncratic rules of grammar, or the cultural patterns, had begun to shape them into socially acceptable beings.
“There was a list of perfectly good words we tiptoed around…”
Or sometimes didn’t, to our great embarassment. I once gave a report on the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac in, IIRR, 8th grade. I didn’t get much farther than “the great iron balls of the Monitor battered in the walls of the Merrimac.”
As far as kid’s words, I still remember fondly Mary Liera’s “icky popups:” a term that still perfectly describes my own encounters with too many movies and TV series. Fortunately, I have Deborah to screen them for me.
Making up words is fun! English appears to embrace novelty. I learned some great and useful words from Sherwood and her stories.
Pilgrimsoul: “English follows other languages into dark alleys, knocks them over, and rifles through their pockets for loose vocabulary.”
Great quote! I don’t recognize it. Who is the source?
In my family, the term for TV remote is “cacker.” As in “Pass the cacker, this is the stupidest show I’ve ever seen.” This somehow grew out of my brother’s term for an object he played with (in my memory it was a piece of wood with rusty nails sticking out of it, but even my laissez-faire parents wouldn’t have permitted that, would they?) with which he “cacked” things.*
What I have loved for years is my kids’ use of words almost correctly. When we lived in NY the elevator door in our old building swung outward rather than folding up. I told me 3 year old daughter once not to stand against the wall–the spot where she stood was exactly where the door would hit if someone opened the door fast.
She looked at me as if to ask why, then said, “OH! Because the door might hit me inadvertently.”
I didn’t know she knew the word. And I certainly didn’t know that (barring issues of intention on the part of the door) she could use it more-or-less correctly.
Madeleine: I LOVE “cacked” as a verb!
Sherwood: In my child psych class, we were recently talking about the issue of correcting a child’s speech. We talked about how, if you’re going to correct something, rather than interrupting the flow of thought or overtly correcting grammar, it’s better to let them say it, gently correct for content (what was said rather than how they said it) if you feel it necessary, and simply use correct grammar when you repeat/respond. That way it doesn’t interrupt their expression and doesn’t seem like criticism, so it doesn’t become stressful for the child or inhibit their desire to speak and experiment with words; we were talking about it in the context of stuttering at the time, because one of my classmates got up and gave a wonderful talk on his personal experience overcoming a severe stutter as a child and adolescent. He was surprised that many of us hadn’t even noticed its remnants in his speech prior to the discussion.
Language fascinates me, and I love seeing the way children’s brains begin processing it too. I’m doing a research paper for that course right now on the connection between storytelling and language development.
Tri: that sounds like a fascinating paper.
Oh yes. I used to stutter a lot when in the presence of adults who could constantly stop me and correct me. That stutter still persists to this day under certain kinds of stress.
If you teach English as a second language, there is a whole new minefield of words which are perfectly harmless in English but sound like something risqué in German.
For example, I’ve had teen boys erupting in giggles over the English word “string”, because they associated it with “String Tanga”, the German term for “thong”.
Oh yes, Cora, and that works the other way, too. I distinctly remember the detentions handed out right and left in my eighth grade German class, when certain boys first stumbled on the third-person present tense form of the verb fahren, without knowing yet what it meant or how to pronounce it.
When I went back to Germany recently, I discovered that young Americans are still giggling over the signs the Germans use to indicate highway exits — “Ausfart” — just as they did when I was young
And there are studies that show that correcting children’s grammar doesn’t actually work. 1st language learning is nothing like other types of learning, it’s way more powerful, and it happens pretty much through positive input alone.
The other problem is that children are often little mirrors who accurately reflect how their interlocutors speak, whether it’s the way they want the children to speak or not.
I love cacker, my family always called the remote: the thingy, which was the best we could do when suffering from the great frustration of trying to find it.
Tri – your paper sounds awesome. Are you running any experiments?
pilgrimsoul: The quote is originally from James Nicolls (sp?).
Thanks for the opportunity to reminisce. I read this post and decided to go to my work in progress folder on the computer to re-read “Cute Antics and Sayings,” a biographical account I’ve recorded about my two children and the funny things they’ve ever said or done. I giggled throughout the 54 pages and my husband asked me, “What are you reading that is so funny?” It was delightful to be reminded of the hilarious things they said as they were acquiring language and making cognitive connections.
One of the funniest memories was when my daughter as a toddler shoved jelly beans up her nose. My son, 18 months older than she said,
“Don’t do that or the doctor will have to get them out with a screwdriver.”
Then my daughter corrected him and said, “He won’t use a screwdriver, he’ll use some wheezers.” Then turning to me she asked, “Will he need to use our wheezers?”
to which I replied, “No, dear, he has his own tweezers.”
It was so much fun to have a great laugh. Thanks.
And Happy Easter.
A few words that my mum came up with when she was a toddler include “ludludth” – meringue or elephant – and “toaknino” – coathanger. There aren’t any family stories about my words, save for the inevitable mispronunciations: merote = remote, merember = remember, and swee = three.
Yes, I imagine that “Ausfahrt” and “fährt” cause some giggle among American kids.
Here’s another unintentionally hilarious ESL favourite: The students were supposed to read a text out loud that included the term “Duke of Northumberland”. I expected pronunciation issues with “Northumberland”, but I also got Duke pronounced as “Duck”, “Dutch” and my personal favourite “Dick”. Suppressing the laughter was difficult.
Cora: lol!
Rhi: Those sound like dyslexos!
Greta: that will be such a treasure one day! Happy Easter to you, too.
Pilgrimsoul: The quote’s by James Nicoll.
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My mother is of a similarly anthropological mind regarding her kids, in terms of being fascinated by all the evidence of how our brains work. (To some extent probably even now that we’re all adults, but obviously this is more dramatically fruitful when you’re talking to kids.) We also all enjoy playing with language, which means there are a number of childhood sayings that have stuck around in family terminology.
One I remember is “I guys,” from when I was a little kid. If you refer to other people in plural as “you guys,” you refer to yourself and your little brothers or friends as “I guys,” right?
Beth B: Kid grammar usually regularized verbs. “I taked a nap.” Makes more sense than took!