Whachamacallits

Anyone who has read my blog for any length of time has likely noticed that I love words. I especially love unusual, descriptive, fun-on-the-tongue words. I recently read an article by Amanda Green entitled, “11 More Enjoyable Names for Common Things” (http://mentalfloss.com/article/49248/11-more-enjoyable-names-common-things). It inspired me to compile my own list of fancy or less-used names for relatively common or at least familiar items. (The first three are courtesy of the referenced article; the rest are mainly a result of my digging through the Merriam Webster Word of the Day archives.)

Griffonage: illegible handwriting. More fun than its simpler equivalent, “chicken-scratch.”

Singultus: hiccups. Just don’t let any of your hypochondriac friends discover this one.

Aphthongs: silent letters, such as the “p” in pneumonia and the “k” in knife. Ironically, the word “aphthongs” does not contain any aphthongs.

Taradiddle: a nonsensical or childish lie. Technically not onomatopoeia, but I’d offer it the honorary title.

Gambit: a remark intended to start a conversation. Wouldn’t you feel classier and more confident walking into a party with a “gambit” in mind instead of a “pick-up line”?

Agon: a dramatic conflict, especially in a literary work. This is a good word to bring up in a discussion of Shakespeare, even if you haven’t read the work under discussion. If it’s Shakespeare, there’s bound to be agon going on somewhere.

Bugbear: an object or source of dread. People discussing Shakespeare at parties is a bugbear that can be banished by using the word “agon.” (See what I did there?)

Tartar: a person of irritable or violent temper. Maggie Smith portrays the Dowager Countess on Downton Abbey as a charming and witty tartar.

 

Malison: a curse. I would love to hear the Dowager Countess pronounce a malison on one of her in-laws.

Oriflamme: a banner, symbol, or ideal inspiring devotion or courage. Since we’re on a PBS theme, the Tardis has become an oriflamme for Whovians everywhere.

Maquette: A small, preliminary model (as of a sculpture or building). It’s not just a mockup of a proposed theatrical set, it’s a maquette!

Welkin: heaven. All’s well under God’s welkin.           

Issles: sparks or embers. Man is born to trouble, as surely as the issles fly up to the welkin.

Borborygmus: rumbling of the intestines. Because we definitely need an elegant word for such an inelegant subject.

Lunette: something shaped like the crescent moon, as an opening for a window. Doesn’t it seem much more poetical when you think of an outhouse as being graced with a “lunette”?

Quiddity: an unusual personal habit or eccentricity. Weirdos who are poor have quirks; weirdos who are rich are eccentric; weirdos with really good vocabularies display quiddity.

Go try some of these out in conversation! Your friends are sure to be impressed by your quiddity.

A Beautiful Mind

Unlike some 2-year-old boys who tend to be the strong, silent type, my son is a talker. He talks night and day. (Literally. He even talks in his sleep.) He has an impressive vocabulary for his age, and he is fascinated by new words. And the bigger, the better. “Humongous,” “articulated,” “stabilizers,” and “breakable” have all had their turn on his list of favorite words. But the top of the list by far this week is the word “beautiful.”

I’m not sure exactly what appeals to him about the word “beautiful.” Perhaps it’s that he can say it quite clearly. Perhaps it’s the sheer number of things to which it can be applied. If I dress up to go out to dinner with my husband – heck, if I put on earrings – my son informs me that I look beautiful. He likes to snitch diaper wipes and use them to clean off his toy trucks, telling me, “Mama, now my snowplow is beautiful,” or “I have a beautiful garbage truck.” While watching an episode of Curious George, he will announce, “George is a beautiful monkey,” or “That is a beautiful big yellow hat.” When he puts on his own yellow play hard hat, he asks, “Do you like my beautiful hat?”

It amazes me when he understands how a word can be used in a context in which he has never heard it before. I’m sure that when he’s seen me dressed up, my husband has told him, “Mama looks beautiful!” And somehow from that, apparently he’s figured out that “beautiful” can refer to an improvement over day-to-day looks; hence his application of the word to toy trucks that have been freshly washed. And he understands that “beautiful” is something special, so he describes Curious George as beautiful (a term I’ve never heard him apply to his stuffed monkeys) because he knows that George is an unusual and special monkey. Some things that are especially dear are called “beautiful,” so his beloved yellow hard hat is beautiful.

Occasionally, I am privileged to hear him talking through a new word as if to figure out how it works. He tends to be rough with toys and dishes, tossing them around carelessly, so I’ve cautioned him that some things are “breakable” so he needs to be extra-careful with them. I pointed out that Mama's coffee mug is breakable. I told him that he can’t step on his smaller toys because they’re breakable. I explained that some things in our house, like vases and candlesticks, are kept on high shelves because they’re breakable. So yesterday when we were having lunch with my father-in-law, my son went around the table carefully identifying various items by their breakability status: “My [plastic sippy] cup is not breakable. Pappy’s [glass] cup is very breakable. Mama’s [glass] cup is very breakable. My [paper] plate is not breakable. That [pointing to a glass vase of flowers] is very breakable.” It’s quite impressive to me that he was able to figure out, entirely on his own, that things made of plastic are usually not breakable and things made of glass almost always are. And when I warned him not to touch a figurine on the windowsill, he immediately understood why, asking, "Oh, this is breakable?"

His fascination with any particular word or concept also seems to help him fit it into the correct context because he uses it at every possible opportunity. When the word “happy” was the word of the week, he would ask me, “Mama is happy?” at least a dozen times a day. (Often out of genuine curiosity but occasionally out of pure hopefulness after he had misbehaved.) And he would inform me, “Ryan is happy!” at least a dozen more. My favorite example of his use of the word happy has to be from a few nights ago when he was being naughty right at bedtime and got sent to bed without his usual bathtub playtime. I was listening to him on the monitor and couldn’t help but laugh as he laid in bed and tearfully protested, “I want to be happy in my tubby!”

The idea of sleeping and being awake is another recent interest, although he applies it to trucks and buildings more often than actual people. When I come down for breakfast, he rarely fails to ask, “Mama, did you have a good sleep?” He announces, “I had a good sleep!” after every nap. When he asks if we’re going to church and we tell him, “Not today,” he inquires if the church is sleeping. On days when we don’t have gymnastics class, he tells us that gymnastics is sleeping. If I try to clarify things by telling him that the gym isn’t sleeping, he just isn’t going there today, he nods and says knowingly, “Oh, gymnastics is NOT sleeping. Gymnastics is awake!” If we pass a work site where he had seen some kind of construction vehicle within the past month and it’s not there, he announces that the backhoe/excavator/skid steer/bucket truck must be sleeping.

I love introducing him to new words, and I love watching him try them out, wrangle with their meaning, and quickly master them in every context. It is, as he might say, a beautiful thing.

Talk To Me

My son Ryan is reaching the age where he can both understand and speak quite a few words. It opens up a whole world of communication between the two of us. Often, this communication is very helpful. For example, when he’s starting to feel sleepy and he’s ready for a nap, either I’ll ask him if he’s “ready to go up?” and he’ll start up the stairs toward his room, or he’ll announce “up, up, up!” to let me know it’s naptime.

Sometimes it’s helpful but a bit embarrassing. When he has a dirty diaper, he’s taken to proclaiming, “Bum!” to let me know. Helpful, but embarrassing, at least in public. And, being a boy, of course another of his new favorite words is “pee”, which he uses to point out the toilet every time he walks past a bathroom, but which he also uses to announce to anyone in the house whenever Mommy goes to use the bathroom. It’s not so bad when Daddy is the only other one home, but when we have guests it becomes a bit of an overshare.

Sometimes his newfound conversational skills are just the tiniest bit too limited. Every afternoon as I bring him downstairs from his nap, as soon as he sees the front door he requests, “Ball! Ball! Ball?” and then gets frustrated because he doesn’t understand my explanation of “after lunch” or “first we have to put your socks and shoes on”. I’m hoping that he’ll begin to understand the words “wait” and “later” very soon, but for now the poor kid gets apoplectic trying to convince me to take him outside to play ball when all I want to do is put on his shoes before we go outside.

But even with his conversational limitations, the fact that we now have give-and-take conversations where we both obviously understand each other is amazing to me. He happily complies with requests for a kiss or a hug, or to bring me a toy, or to throw something in the trash, or to show something to Daddy. Instead of merely pointing and grunting when he wants something, he can now often specifically ask for something that’s out of reach, like a book or a ball or a teddy bear or a pillow. He’ll even pick out a video by the picture on the cover and bring it to one of us, telling us which one it is by announcing “Pooh!” or roaring like the Lion King or making a monkey noise like King Louie in the Jungle Book.

But I’d better cut this entry short – I hear a small voice from the other room announcing, “uh-oh”…

There's a Double Meaning in That

My son doesn’t have much of a vocabulary yet. In fact, his total vocabulary consists of the following: “up”, “ball”, “bye-bye”, and “k” (which means “clock”). But for having only four words, he gets an awful lot of mileage out of them.

For one thing, each word has multiple meanings to him. “Up” means not only “up” as in going up stairs, but it also refers to the stairs themselves. I discovered this a few days ago when we were driving on a road in a hilly area where all the houses had stairs leading to them, and he eagerly pointed at each one and announced, “Up!” Similarly, “bye-bye” means not only “goodbye”, but is also used to indicate a door of any kind, whether or not anyone is leaving through it at the time.

The multiple use of “ball” developed from his after-service playtime in the church gymnasium, which has several basketball hoops. Every time we pull into the church parking lot, he points and exclaims, “Ball!” which I assumed referred to the basketballs that he plays with there, but then I noticed that when we pulled into our own driveway, he pointed to the neighbors’ house across the road and announced, “Ball!” as well. I was confused, since I didn’t see any balls there – until I realized that they have a basketball hoop in their driveway. He confirmed this association when we were driving by a random house with a basketball hoop and he again announced, “Ball!”, and once again when the Sesame Street set featured a basketball hoop. So apparently “ball” now refers to “basketball hoop” as well as anything vaguely resembling an actual ball.

But the most flexible word in his vocabulary is most definitely “k”. “K” applies to any kind of clock or timepiece, from a grandfather clock to a wall clock to a clock on a church tower to a wristwatch. But it also applies to anything with any kind of a dial or face, and anything round with hashmarks on it. Hospitals and grocery stores are both rife with “k” things, by this definition. Hospitals have blood pressure monitors with round gauges and bright orange hands, oxygen tank pressure gauges, even stethoscopes with printing on the business end. Grocery stores have big round produce scales and small deli thermometers, all of which he helpfully calls my attention to with a proud “K!”.

I’m certain that he’ll be adding more words to his vocabulary very soon. Hopefully, “vroom!” will give way to “car”, “buh-dup-a-dup” will become the more recognizable “banana”, and the words we’ve been repeating over and over, like “Mama” and “Dadda” and “cup” and “help” will finally sink in. But until they do, at least he’s making good use of the words he has. And hopefully, his creative use of language will continue to expand even as his vocabulary does!