Playing with Language

“Do you want to read a book?” 

“No, I want to crayon.” 

“Oh, you want to color?” What made my 3-year-old grandson turn that noun into a verb? He knows “draw” and “color.” Ah…but then, there is “paint,” which can be noun or verb! I’m constantly in awe of the brain playing with and learning language—whether it is small children or high schoolers, whether it’s a first language or a second language. When I’m with my grandson, I wonder what it would be like if 10th graders could feel the freedom to experiment that he has.

For example, he reproduces phrases he’s heard that sound fun or heavy with emotional content, even though his meaning is very approximate. A few weeks ago it was the sentence “It’s been shut down for years.” The original context seems to have come from a cartoon where there was an undersea station that had been abandoned for a while. My grandson began applying it to any forgotten and unused thing—a toy behind the couch, a diaper under the sink.  

Sometimes he does ask about a word. Sometimes when he does ask, it isn’t a new word. I wonder what makes him realize that this word he’s heard hundreds of times…he now wants a more exact understanding of it. For instance, recently I was reading him a Berenstein Bears book—he has a big stack which he has been through many times. Suddenly, one day, he stopped me in the middle of one and said, “Grandma, what is a cub?” 

Yesterday I was reading him Ferdinand the Bull, a children's book I remember having around our house when I was growing up. I read to him about the other little bull calves who enjoyed butting heads, and before I even turned the page he informed me, “But Ferdinand wanted to sit under his favorite cork tree and smell the flowers!” The line awoke some familiar echoes in me. I turned the page and looked at the ink drawing I had completely forgotten about: a beautifully gnarled old tree with bunches of corks hanging from the branches like grapes from a vine. I smiled at the joke, but then noticed my grandson carefully studying the drawing, absorbing it as the truth of the world. 

“Do you know what a cork tree is?” 

“No.” A quick glance around the house—no bottle corks, no bulletin boards…. I attempted an explanation, which he listened to patiently, solemnly punctuating with, “Oh.” I’m sure he’s still clueless. Still, I had to try.

With all the language we learn, there are bound to be misconceptions we only uncover much later--how cork really grows will probably be one of his. My younger daughter informed me recently that as she was singing a lullaby to her 1-year-old, it suddenly struck her that a bushel and a peck were both dry measures. She’d always skipped over “bushel” and thought of “peck” as a kiss, like “a peck on the cheek—especially since it is immediately followed by “and a hug around the neck.” 

Still, experimentation is the way forward. Like the way my grandson combined the scariest phrases from all the stories he could think of to express the dire fate of one of the animal figurines we were playing with:

3-yr-old: The giant got him.
Me: Oh, no! What's going to happen to him?
3-yr-old: Fee-fi-fo-fum, fall down, inside the giant, smashed, dead, slaves of the Egyptians! 

He has a limited vocabulary, he uses wrong verb tenses and pronoun case, but he can definitely get his point across! Isn’t language complex and mysterious and wonderful? The way we learn it, and the way communication happens. May we all be as creative and passionate and tenacious as this 3-year-old…and encourage our students to as well!