Tag Archives: language acquisition

The lexicographer

Greyscale photo of a stack of old books and papers in a room
Photo by Felipe Furtado

The bookshelf falls with a conclusive thud. Volumes of dictionaries flap to the floor, their spines irreparably dislocated, their yellow pages exposed to greedy, scurrying mice. Billy the lexicographer realises with a tremor of despair that he is trapped. A lifetime acquiring language will end with him suffocating under the weight of words. 

He’ll spend his final moments naming things: the marble table, the antique wardrobe, the upholstered dining room chairs. Bodies of plastic baby dolls, a bag of mouldy limbs and hairless, eyeless heads. Mountains of newspaper, rodent insulation. Grandmother’s tarnished silverware. A treasure box of costume jewellery. 

An unfamiliar longing: to be free of noun phrases. To unacquire language. Billy’s gaze scurries frantically around the room, replacing objects with object pronouns. This. That. Those. Them. Him. Me. 

They. He. I. The objects become subjects. The subjects invite agreeable verbs. The verbs are finite: This too shall pass. 

I, too, shall pass, decides Billy. He raises himself up upon mouldy legs, passes a trembling hand over a hairless head and clears a path through his storeroom of hoarded language. 

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Nothing doing

Greyscale photo of little boy in striped shirt
Photo by Naira Babayan

‘Daddy, you shouldn’t say that word. It hurts Okkers’s ears.’

‘Tell Oscar there’s nothing wrong with doggie do,’ I said.

I’d just stepped in a steaming pile of canine shit and wasn’t in the mood to argue linguistic politeness with my son’s imaginary friend.

‘He says you should say poo instead. And his name is Okkers, not Oscar.’

Ordinarily I’d have been fascinated by Oliver’s selective metathesis, but the word metathesis reminded me of thesis, which reminded me of the PhD I still hadn’t finished, on child language acquisition of all things. 

As it turned out, logophobia was running in our family, if family extended to invisible members like Okkers. Days after the doggie do incident I was still being policed on my use of the offending word.

I assumed it was its noun form that was considered indecent. It turned out Okkers found it equally offensive in its more common use as a verb. 

You’d be surprised at how often you use the word do. Still, testing Okkers’s sensitivities offered a welcome, and not entirely off-topic (or so I told myself), distraction from my thesis.

‘Is Okkers offended by the auxiliary and the main verb use of the verb?’ I asked Oliver.

‘What’s an Ox Hillary?’

‘Like, when you’re posing a question in the simple aspect. Do you want an ice cream, for instance.’

‘Ew! Stop!’

‘You don’t want an ice cream?’

‘Stop it!’ (Clearly the negative contraction was also a problem for Okkers. I provided the promised ice cream to make up for my linguistic missteps.)

The ever perceptive Okkers noticed every form of do, not just auxiliaries and negative contractions, but also inflections for person and tense (does, did), and when used as a pro-verb, as in What are you doing? He took particular issue with the participles (doing, done). He could spot these from a mile away.

Our conversations around the topic became so fascinating that I made space for both of them in my office. We spent hours discussing the intricacies of the taboo word, ingeniously avoiding voicing it, forming ever more convincing hypotheses about its unfortunate omnipresence in the English language.

My wife became suspicious. ‘What are you going up there?’ she shouted from the hallway. We’d locked the door. ‘Are you getting anything done?’

Together we groaned, the three of us, with murderous intent.

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