language
You are viewing stuff tagged with language.
You are viewing stuff tagged with language.
Well if this isn’t just the most perfect paragraph:
I reserve the right to make up a word if I can’t fromate one that suits the immediate need of a sentence. This is where heroes step in and fix the inadequacies of the English Language.
Via Mykala, this morning:
“Mama, is ‘stupendous’ another way to say ‘excellent’?”
“YES. Who taught you that?”
“Nobody. Me. I taught myself. I just taught my bones and my skin and my brain.”
That is stupendous.
Ess has a stuffed finger-puppet parrot, and she insists that this type of bird is pronounced “paragraph.”
This is Toonie’s house. Essie’s gesticulations and speech have changed so dramatically in the past six months—I love when she corrects me when I’m not being precise enough or, in this case, when one of us may be imagining something differently than she.
When we draw with chalk on the driveway, Ess doesn’t call it “drawing” or “coloring” — her preferred term is “chalkin’”.
“We’re chalkin’, Mama!”
At the library, Ess found a toy stethoscope. Listening to its heartbeat sounds, she asked me what it was called and I told her.
Later on she declared that she’s going to have to use the check-up-scope to make sure her stuffed penguin was OK.
Check-up-scope.
“What does it mean when something is fragile, Ess?”
“You hold it very very gentle and close to your HEART.”
If you ask Ess to say “snake” she’ll say “tank”. She usually drops the sibilant “S” sound at the beginning of words; if we really try to get her to say it, she’ll go with the “sh” phoneme.
If you ask her to say “Sammy the Snake” you get “Hammy the Tank”.
“Hey Essie, can you come sit on my lap to read the book?”
“No, I have to see it from far away.”
“Essie, what color is Dada’s hair?”
“Brown, like a moose!”
“Essie, tell Monkey Marge to say goodnight to Dada.”
“Goodnight, Dada. … ooh ooh aah aah.”
Ess likes to watch a movie called Curious George Swings into Spring, but she asks for it by saying something like “watch… maow… ping… and balloons UP and UP” or some other kind of variation on her summary of the plot. To translate: her stuffed monkey’s name is Marge, nicknamed Mow, so monkeys get called Mows; there are hot air balloons in the movie in many shapes, and sometimes we have only the barest hint of a guess which movie she’s referring to. There’s also ‘Crinkas Pooh’ (Christmas Pooh), ‘Pump pump Mow’ (Curious George: A Halloween Boo Fest), and ‘Ringinal Pooh’ (The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, which we sometimes call Original Pooh).
Saving Essie’s pronunciation of banana for posterity.
We’ve been teaching Ess that people have more than one name. For example, her grandpa Bop’s name is Michael. “I know a Michael, I know a Michael!” she explains, riffing off her book I Know a Monkey. So, my nickname for Mykala is Bun, which we told Ess kind of in passing, not intending to or even trying really to teach it to her.
Mykala accidentally dyed her hair orange today, which kind of sidetracked our movie plans. (After some corrections, it’s currently more of a henna shade.) So, Ess and I headed over to my parents for a visit. She was unusually quiet in her carseat, watching the big drops hit her window. At my parent’s, I got to see how Ess is trying to figure out how to go to the bathroom not in her diaper; she’d tell use she wanted to sit on her potty chair, and then absolutely nothing would happen. The stages of connecting the urge to the action to the result are interesting — like the animal and human parts of the brain are learning to communicate for the first time.
Paul McCartney, 1965: “Yesterday came suddenly.” I don’t know what that means, but if I squint, it looks like he’s saying time passes quickly.
So, yesterday: I got done with work and went to my parent’s to pick up Ess. She now knows how to put her little shoes on. They look like this:
“Mahn-ee Dada. Mahn-ee!” Ess says as she grabs my finger and pulls. That’s how she says “come on over here.” How could you say no?
Out of nowhere, Essie says two word sentences to us. This helps us meet her needs and wants, until she runs out of the correct words. Then we’re back to sign language and grunts. We’re also seeing the advent of frustration, whose development I find interesting yet a little sad. This little girl who before would sit and try to do something over and over, showing perseverance but no frustration, will now get immensely frustrated over her inability to do something, typically something physically intricate.
“Dada, hi!” and then a pause. “Dada… hi.” Essie had just turned to see what I was doing at the edge of the bedroom, and while she has been uttering expressive morphemes in response to me and my actions for a while, her greeting marked one of her first definite sentences at me. The thrill! Burbles and gurgles of infancy have so quickly become expressions of thought and opinion and frustration and love.
If Essie doesn’t know or can’t say the word for something, it is always always ‘dahVEE’. “Can you say ‘refrigerator’?” we ask. Then, with utter confidence comes the response: dahVEE. “What’s that?” we query, pointing to something new. It’s a dahVEE. Obviously.
Essie’s word for bug is “bugah” or I suppose “bug-ah” but those two sounds blend together so seamlessly, and she so rarely says it once, that you really get bugahbugahbugahbugah. So that’s anything small and colored dark. Most things requiring a pincer grip. “What’s that?” we ask. “Bugahbugah. BUGAHBUGAHBUGAH.” comes her reply.
Essie just started her own game of peek-a-boo with me; she is standing behind her highchair and peeking out at me with a huge smile. So so sweet. Some of her current abilities and habits to record right now:
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