electric boogaloo

See, the way humans acquire language is this: The baby/toddler listens to people talk to him, notices some particular feature of human speech, then cutes up the house practicing that feature.

1. They listen and hear people saying “Blah blah blah” — so they babble.

2. Once they get that down, they listen and notice that language has intonation and particular sounds to it - so the baby starts babbling in fake English or Portuguese or what have you.

3. Oh, wow! Some words mean things. That could be useful! So they practice learning nouns and ignore the rest.

4. Then they notice oh shit, wait — there’s a whole grammar going on here. And they spend the next two years practicing the many ridiculously complicated and annoying rules of their language’s basic grammar. Where verbs go, how to make thing possessive or plural, how to properly tell someone to step the hell off of your foam blocks, etc.

5. Once they have that down, they start tuning in to the nuances of conversation. Turn taking is the most obvious feature, so they practice that for awhile before noticing that conversations are supposed to run along a single topic. Aha! What we’re doing here — maybe the point of everything back to the babbling — is talking about something. So they have to practice listening to a conversation, identifying the topic at hand, and joining in with their own relevant comments.

Graham has entered phase 5. It’s awesome. If everyone is talking about something that happened long ago, he scans his brain for something that will fit in the conversation. It can be anything, as long as it sounds sort of related. I just hope he outgrows it before adulthood…

ADULT #1: I thought the pacing of the movie was odd. It made it feel like the audience is peering in on someone’s life. I wonder if that was a deliberate choice?

ADULT #2: I don’t know, but it felt slow to me. Maybe that’s why.

ADULT # 1: Or maybe they just didn’t edit it very well, so the whole thing ended up sort of plodding along.

ADULT #2: Right - well the movie was good, but definitely odd.

ADULT # 3: I saw a movie about a ROBOT!

Which is a much more interesting turn in the conversation really, but some people aren’t that open minded.

On Sunday, we were up in the mountains of South Carolina. Nicolaus and Graham were sitting with their cousin Gavin, all in tiny plastic chairs, under/inside a low, wide, squatting sort of tree. I don’t know what kind of tree it was, but its branches made a perfect little house for kids. They sat in there and talked about bad guys and theoretical physics and other topics of interest to children.

They heard thunder in the distance. Gavin, the oldest, looked up through the branches. “Was that thunder? Maybe we should get out from under this tree so we don’t get killed.”

“Why would we get killed?”

“Because! Lightening could strike the tree and boom, kill us.”

Nicolaus thought about that for a second. “No,” He said, “I don’t think it would kill us. Because wood doesn’t conduct electricity really very much. So if lightening hit the top of the tree, it couldn’t really travel all the way down here to kill us.”

“Oh. But! What IF that storm turns out to be a tornado? That could kill us for sure.”

“Yeah. Or a hurricane! We could be blown away or even flooded right out of here. And you might not think so, but floods can kill us because we aren’t, we aren’t wearing life jackets.”

“Oh yeah. A hurricane would definitely kill us.”

Graham, having analyzed the topic at hand and identified it as a serious and important one, joined in with a helpful offer: “If I had a knife. If I had a pocket knife? I could kill y’all.”

I want to hug him all day long.