Little-isms

I love the way Little Sweetie says “skelt” for ‘skeleton.’ In general I love his whole way of speaking. He has an excellent English vocabulary—quite extensive for a five-year-old—and a slight tone of adultism. (For example, when Darlin' and Pumpkin upset him by teasing him he said, “I don’t like this attitude!” And for the first couple months of school, if someone did something dangerous he would opine, “It’s not a good habit.” We quoted that priceless line around the house for weeks.)

He loves to learn new words, often asks for a word’s meaning, and absorbs new vocabulary quickly. Most recently he learned the word ‘mischevious,’ which he employs with glee and in the proper context. When the cap fell off his water bottle he grinned up at me and said, “It’s a mischevious cap!” The duck in our new favorite book, A Splendid Friend Indeed is “a mischevious duck!”

As his father (Papa) and grandfather (Baripapa) are both doctors, he knows quite a bit about health, nutrition, and medical terminology. The other kids learned the term ‘fracture’ from him. (“If you do that, you could fall down and get a fracture!” he warns.) He also knows about cholesterol, and that it is not good to eat egg yolks. He often brings a tupperware full of 2-3 hard-boiled egg whites to school for lunch, and one afternoon I was amused to hear him saying to Little Darlin', “Why you eat this part?”
“It’s good,” explained L.D., offering his hard-boiled egg (yolk included) to Little Sweetie to try. Little Sweetie continued trying to explain that egg yolks were bad and Little Darlin', assuming that his friend had never had the opportunity to sample this taste treat, kept trying to convince him of the deliciousness of a complete boiled egg.

Little Sweetie is highly imaginative, and very verbal and chatty. He loves to talk and tell about things, and often comes up with very funny and creative explanations and stories. One of my favorites was when he settled down for Circle Time one morning and started telling me a story about the bacteria having a party in his mouth. He knew it was a story and enjoyed the image, and the tale (as did I). We had a lovely little discussion about tooth-brushing.

Little Pumpkin is a whole phonemic system unto herself. She pronounces hard ‘c’ as ‘t’ and hard ‘g’ as ‘d,’ creating such endearing communiques as “I lite dis boot! Dis very dood boot!” (As a result, I live for days when we read a story she especially likes) or “Today Mr. Nadeem will tum?” Another of my favorites is “I want a tiffoo.” This one is employed when she needs a tissue to dry her hands or blow her nose. I haven’t noticed difficulty with ‘sh’ in other circumstances.

Little Darlin' sometimes teases Pumpkin about that last, and tries to teach her to say ‘tish-yoo,’ which is really funny since tissue is one of the few words in which he correctly pronounces the ‘sh’ sound himself. Usually he says /s/, as in “Pesawar” instead of 'Peshawar.'
As far as Little Darlin' goes, he has created a veritable language of personal words and phrases, and it has quickly spread throughout the student body. (Eight kids, if you don’t count the preschool—they don’t seem to have absorbed Darlin'-ese as yet.) Now practically the entire school is saying nonsense words like “Sugduckdee,” “tish-kah” (the noise with which small boys imitate guns), and the most popular, “butti-amma.” Buttiamma is an actual word, slang for ‘old lady,’ and it is by far the most popular of Little Darlin’s lexical gifts to the school. For awhile there Philosophical T.A. and I thought we were going to lose our minds if he didn’t stop saying that infernal word; at the moment, Habibeh is charming his mother by calling her a buttiamma at every opportunity.

For awhile Little Darlin' would use the word 'stupid' fairly often to refer to anything he didn’t like. He was quickly broken of this habit, as the student body seems, almost of its own accord, to have declared ‘stupid’ a very bad word indeed. For a long time Roomie and I would privately employ this particular “Darlin'-ism” at home (“stupid load-shedding”). Adorably, when I asked Little Darlin' to explain Appreciations during Class Meeting for then-newcomer Little Pumpkin he said, “No stupid words, and no ooloo* words, and no bad words: is not good.)

*Ooloo means ‘owl’ in Urdu, and is used as an insult meaning ‘stupid’ or ‘idiot.’