Hokay y'all. Remember when I had this wonderful idea to catalog all of the cool things my brain does when it comes to pop linguistics and everyday life?? That was a year ago. A year ago. It's not that I don't like posting every thought I have onto the internet (sorry) it's just that a bunch of stuff happened and I guess I just put this on the backburner for a WHOLE YEAR. I have gotten requests from a few of you to keep this thing going and I have finally had enough mental stimulation to get this started again. Sorry for the year-long interim of nothingness but a lot has changed since then. This also means that there is a bunch of cool new language-y shit going on in the world and I'm about to tell you all about it and what my brainparts think about it!
This particular post isn't about pop linguistics but it is about some other interesting and way cool stuff
Here goes nothin':
Two months ago I got hired as an after-school counselor for a large corporation with four initials and a theme song. By some wonderful aligning of planets I got put in charge of a group of 13 5-year-old boys.
3.5 hours a day x 4 days a week x 8 weeks = 112 hours of listening to a nonstop stream of weird shit that kindergarten boys keep in their brains
I'm not an expert in the kindergarten brain, its cognitive developments or 5-year-olds' retention abilities but I can tell you all about the words that get formed by very young brains trying to make sense of the world around them.
I feel like I put the real world on hold for a few hours every day because there is no such thing as casual conversation with these small people. My portly brunette boy will march straight up to me at the beginning of the program and proudly declare "My grandpa Hank wears a wig" then take his seat at the table or throw some legos at his friend or do a handstand or any other thing that he finds appropriate to do at that moment. My job is to say "yes that's wonderful, G" and move on to counting a dozen other children who are doing similarly ridiculous things. I have no room in my brain or schedule to have a serious conversation about G's grandfather's wig even though I may have many questions about it (does it fall off often? how about when he sneezes? does he use it as a party trick? why is it so important to you? etc) but I often think about my kindergartners' outbursts as pent-up information that they simply cannot hold in their brains any longer and must let out without any expectation of further dwelling on those topics. I'll use this blog as a sort of kindergarten sayings log where I present some of the weird-ass sentences these boys construct and expel.
Some current favorites:
"In dinosaur world its another dimension you don't I don't understand it we can't understand it"
"We're blattlin' blay-blaydes"
"I lived in a candy house once but I ated it all up and we had to move"
"I brunged it. I branged it back. I bringed it back, Miss Anna"
Those last two sentences are what interest me the most (though the attempt at "we're battling bey-blades" is pretty cute.) There is a whole psychological explanation for them and I understand this but I just want to point out how cool it is that kindergartners get basic English rules of grammar because we use them all the time. In this case it's that one adds a -d or -ed morpheme to the end of a word to make it past tense.
The boy who blatantly lied to my face about his living situation wasn't satisfied with "ate" being a past tense verb so he tacked a -d onto the end and voila! Something that actually makes sense! The last example is the most impressive, though. This young man experimented with incorrect versions of "bring" (though it's easy to see why he chose "brunged" and "branged") until he found something that suited the rule of verb + /d/ = past tense verb.
I try not to correct my kids when they misspeak because hammering prescriptivism into their heads, in my opinion, will ruin their sense of wonder with our language. They can still do whatever they want with it and not only get away with it but create really bizarre forms of expression that accurately express whatever cool weird stuff happens in that five-year-old briny gray mush.
(for a cool site dedicated to small children saying silly things check out Preschool Gems.)
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