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Saturday, June 04, 2011

Gerunds and other language acquisition tales

Like Rachel, who coined the terms "scissoring" and "markering" to describe the act of cutting paper with scissors and the act of colouring with felt pens, respectively, when she was younger, Miriam is all about gerunds lately.

Anything can be verbed and from there turned into a gerund.

For example, when I took Miriam out of the bathtub today she informed me that she was "outing."

Another one of our favourites is "pantsing." This describes the act of putting pants on, contrary to the more widely known definition (at least in junior high schools) of pulling someone else's pants down. Still, it's humorous to hear our little baby walking around saying "Pantsing! Pantsing! Pantsing!"

I can't say, "Let's get dressed!" in the mornings, otherwise we have to rifle around through her drawers to find one of two play dresses. Skirts, shorts, pants, shirts are all out of the question. If I say "get dressed" Miriam has to put a dress on. I've been making an effort to say "Let's put some clothes on!" instead but old habits die hard and I'm still more prone to saying the former term.

Rachel is still asking for help with un-insiding-out things, and it's still wonderful to hear her use that jumbled up term. She recently made up another word: yewerit.

It sounds like a horrible creature, but really it's part of the game known as "tag."


"You're my you're it!" she'll declare, before running away and taunting, "You can't get me!"

Doesn't the way she say it make it sound like a monster of sorts?

A Yewerit. Sounds scary.

When I tagged her I said, "Now you're my it, right?"

"No. I'm your Yewerit!"she replied. 

I wonder if I did a master's degree in language development, would anyone object to a thesis documenting my children's language development in anecdotal form? Is that academic enough? 

I'm partial to anecdotes and find language development so fascinating; I love listening to (and uncoding) my children's language evolution. But! Only one parent in grad school at a time; that's my rule.

1 comment:

  1. A masters thesis that people would actually read? It would never fly.

    ReplyDelete