My granddaughter is nearly 2, and speech is developing fast and furiously. Much is easily identifiable - like *nana *for banana. But there’s one that has us all stumped.
She’s a fan of My Little Pony videos. She refers to them as mahnu. Just now, I listened to my daughter telling her to say pony, and she repeatedly said mahnu.
I’m not at all familiar with the franchise - is there something that sounds like *mahnu *associated with the characters or stories? Or is this darling child just weird?
How about your kids/grandkids/sibs/random young 'uns - any of them communicate with interesting vocabulary?
When my favorite nephew was little, still at mama dada stage, he was visiting me one day and reached a hand toward the cat’s litter box. I yelled, startling him, to leave the shit alone. He looked at me with a puzzled expression and said, “shit?” totally understandably.
I laughed. He said “shit”. Rinse, repeat. My sister was pretty pissed off when she found out.
**kayaker **- you reminded me of an incident with my niece when she was about 2 or 3. She was in the car with my sister (her mother), in her car seat, trying to put her sunglasses on top of her head. After several attempts, she threw the glasses to the floor with a hearty “Fuck it!” Wonder where she learned that one?
COTU#2, who is actually in elementary school now, can still get jabbering on a 125-mph streak, leaving me in the dust. I have to turn to another adult, and say, “Translation, please?”
FCM, you might have to wait years for the manhu to be untangled. All the while I was growing up, a great frivolity happened every Christmas when the tree-topper was set on the decorated tree. My mother would get excited and proclaim, “Crickedy-dah.”
Momma said that was a name I apparently gave the topper when I was little. She and Daddy had set upmthe tree, and when the topper was unwrapped, I was over the moon, pointing and yelling “Crickedy-dah! Crickedy-dah!”
Years and years and years later, during Christmastime after we’d all laughed yet again about my strange name for the tree topper, I gave it some serious thought, with the better understanding I have of my hearing loss.
The lil’wrekker had trouble with saying her ‘S’, resulting in many comical moments.
When she was about three I was fostering a litter of kittens. They stayed in a box in the kitchen. I would sit in the floor and bottle feed them and the lil’wrekker always ‘helped’ me. One morning the kittens were clambering allover and she was having trouble keeping them in the box. One kitten scratched her. She looked at me and said: “the little battard 'cratched me.”
Needless to say I didn’t correct her ‘S’ in that sentence.
**Beck **- the “s” sound must be tough for kids - I’ve noticed that over the years. Even RoxStar has some problems with it. Star comes out as a cross between *tar *and dar. And she pronounces her own name as something close to Rory rather than Roxy. I’m sure it’s all part of the mouth muscle development and stuff like that there. I figure as long as we speak to her in clear English, she’ll figure it out long before we figure it out!
I was in the home of a dear friend of mine. Wonderful lady. Excellent mom. Can’t think of a bad thing to say about her.
We sat and had coffee and talked, four of us and the Excellent Mom. Meanwhile, her three year old wandered around. She seemed to be looking for something. At one point, Excellent Mom realized – and remarked – that Toddler was probably looking for her pacifier.
After a good ten minutes of wandering around looking under and over and on top of things, Toddler stopped in the middle of the room. Parked her chubby fists on her little hips. And in a picture perfect imitation of the Excellent Mom, with mild irritation and a slight lisp, remarked:
“Well, THIT.”
Everyone except Excellent Mom and Toddler promptly collapsed in gales of laughter.
Toddler stared at us, confused.
Excellent Mom corroded to dust and died on the spot of sheer embarrassment.
My daughter was a very verbal child who, like her mom before her, would get impatient at any impediment to her being understood and would just make her own words as necessary to get her point across. My parents had been puzzled all my life about how I had decided that “bone dat” is how you ask a parent to butter the toast and why “sookin” is a cromulent word for “finger.” To this day we still use daughter’s term “weewo” for burrito because, well, that’s just cute. She learned many words just fine, unfortunately, as I discovered while driving somewhere and tuned into her babbling in her car seat and heard, “Beep beep! Jerk! Asshole!” Yeah, learned to turn that stuff way down after that.
My son was different since he had his older sister to speak for him and he’d just remain silent until he had a word perfectly mastered. We were working on my car one day and I was holding him as he pointed to various parts and perfectly mimicked back all kinds of things like “distributor cap” and “spark plug” and “intake manifold” and “transmission” and “radiator” to the point where everyone in earshot was rather floored since most everyone thought he was slow because of being less chatty than his sister. Perfect pronunciation of every term, first time hearing them. Smart kid, just quiet.
Mid-daughter let Son-of-a-wrek talk for her for a long time. He often told me “Sissy is thirsty” I had to ignore him to make her ask for things herself. She finally started chattering. Now, I can’t shut her up, sometimes.
While driving my darling child, she suddenly responded to my very mild expletive with “Who’s a jerk, Mama?” I made an effort to self-censor from then on… well, till now. We cuss together now.
The latest in toddler-speak. Roxy’s new favorite book is about sea life. She’ll open to the page with the whale and declare, loudly, WHALE! When asked, she can point out jellyfish, eels, sea horses, skates, and fish. But in her language, octopus sounds suspiciously like apple. If you ask her to point out the octopus, she picks the correct critter, but it’s still called apple. And her word for fish sounds suspiciously like geeesh! yes, with the exclamation point.
Is that too adorable or what?
Going back 50-some years, my youngest sister used to call the stuff that came out of the faucet goody. I’m guessing because most natives of Baltimore say *wooder *for water.
I love toddler-speak, and sounds like Roxie is a master at it. I’m looking forward to future examples of Roxy-speak.
Here’s one of mine:
When he was a toddler, my son never said “Yes.” He said, “Aye.”
I’d say, “You want this?” and he’d nod and say “Aye,” in his deep little voice. There were no pirates about. (I checked.) It’s unlikely he got it from TV, as we only got one station, and he very seldom watched that. He didn’t go to daycare. Maybe he was channeling Robert Burns.
