Thursday, 9th August 2007.

Lost For Words (part II)

Someone once said to me that you don't really appreciate Monsters Inc until you have a toddler running around your house. I'd be inclined to agree, as I've had a similar experience with Teletubbies - it's a programme that works on a whole new level when you watch it with a small child. It's not just the beaming smile that he cracks when that freakish sun-baby appears over the horizon, or the way
he shouts "Noo Noo!" (which was, incidentally, one of his first really coherent words) whenever we're graced with the presence of the long-nosed vacuum cleaner.

Such things are obviously designed for small children - they've done their research and they know what works, and it's lasted this long because they tapped into TV that small children love. But what's *really* good about Teletubbies is the way in which they use language. The baby-like, slightly mispronounced responses of the Tubbies to anything that the narrator says are exactly how Josh seems to speak these days - it's less a conversation than a repetition:

"Josh? Are we going outside?"
<wipes nose> "Go outside!"
"Are we going in the car?"
"Joshua get in car!"
"Shall we listen to some music?"
"Listening MOOOO-sic."

This is, of course, familiar territory to anyone who's ever seen Laa Laa playing with her ball ("Laa Laa play with ball!") or the ultra-camp Tinky Winky worrying the Christian right with his omnipresent handbag ("Tinky Winky BAG!"). It's not clear to what extent the show inspires the conversational style, rather than echoing real-life development, but that's a chicken-egg argument that I don't want to get into here. The simple truth is that watching Teletubbies is uncannily like having a conversation with Josh - as it will be, I'm sure, with Thomas when he gets big enough.

"I wish," said Emily the other day, "that he'd learn that a conversation is a two-way dialogue between people, and not just him repeating everything that you say." I can relate to that. Josh is picking things up as he goes along, and at no point have I been worried about his development, but it can be slightly annoying when he merely repeats everything you say. It means that explaining things feels like a futile gesture, simply because you don't know how much of what you say ("Don't hit your brother" / "Be nice to Rosina" / "Step away from the garden shears" is just something he can use to say back to you, to further his vocabulary.

"Did you enjoy that, Josh?"
"Enjoy that Josh!"
"Did you go on the swing?"
"Go on swings!"
"Oh, you little parrot."
"Little parrot. Little parrot."
"Polly wanna cracker?"
At this his face lit up and he cried out "PRAWN cracker!".

Sometimes I worry about this: I try very hard not to swear in front of the children but last week found myself blurting out "Shit!" when I was cut up rather badly in a Haverfordwest car park. Somewhat miraculously this was the only phrase that Josh didn't choose to pick up - he'd spent the last few minutes fashioning out a parrot-like echo of his mother's "What's going on?", as declared when we hit gridlock coming out of Morrisons. Over the next few minutes he would ask "What's going on?" at every conceivable opportunity, whether there actually was something going on or not. We answered as best as
we could, but had to wonder how much was going in. Still, it made a decent change from his typical refrain of "Daddy, what's that noise?" - an expression he seems to have picked up the last time we were in Shropshire and has used with alarming regularity ever since.

It's a fad thing. He'll cotton onto a new word and use it as much as he can for a while, before getting bored of it and archiving it to the back of his head for occasional use. Just lately he seems to have turned into something of a shopoholic: Emily told me that when they walked through Didcot yesterday afternoon Josh would swing towards the open doorways of every charity store they passed with the words "Shop!". When she talked about this it reminded me of the Harry Enfield sketch (available on YouTube) where three oversized, dome-headed Aliens were attempting to learn English with an increasingly impatient narrator. He's trying to teach them about nouns, but at every mention of the word 'Shop' they dash into Woolworths and emerge with piles of bags:

"That's a shop. You buy things in a shop. No, wait - "
<all three dash inside, emerging with piles of bags>
"All right, you can show us all the things you've bought in the shop."
"SHOP!" <they dash back inside, and emerge with more bags>
"All right, that's quite enough shopping. What's this?"
"Tree!"
"No, lamp post."
"Tree!"
"Lamp post!"
"Tree!"
"All right, it's a bloody tree."

Doing your best to avoid swearing only goes so far. You can't control the general populace - I remember sitting on a bus with Josh recently and finding a group of teenagers sitting a few rows in front of us. One of them started swearing like a trooper, only to have his friend elbow him in the ribs and say "Hey, watch the language. There are kids here". I almost hugged him. Even then there are still problems when your children mispronounce things - there was the woman whose three-year-old blurted out "Give me my fucking knife!" in the middle of a family dinner, but while they were still reeling from the shock her father realised she'd meant "fork and knife".

Last I heard, they were trying to get her to say "knife and fork", but what am I supposed to do when my brother in law gives me strange looks while Joshua starts bellowing "Shit! Shit!" in the middle of breakfast? Sunny and Stanley foraged for leftovers round the table, and Matt rumpled his brow. "What's that he's saying?" he asked, accompanied by a what-sort-of-parent-are-you kind of look.
"It's fine," I replied through a mouthful of toast. "He's talking to the dogs. 'Watch it! Watch it!'"

The defendant pleads ignorance, your honour. That said, there are occasions when I'm reminded of exactly how much Joshua *does* understand, such as this morning. I'd risen at half past six as usual, and an hour later was seated at the PC trying to calm a whinging Thomas with some recently-acquired Cat Stevens. He seemed to quite enjoy Father and Son, so when Joshua woke a few minutes later I took them both into our bedroom for some family time with Mummy (who was still only half-awake) before she took me to work. Wanting to calm them both down, I went back to the Stevens in a slightly cracked baritone.

"It's not time to make a change,
Just sit down, take it easy,
You're still young, that's your fault,
There's so much you have to go through..."

Daddy Sang Bass. All was going well until I reached the end of the first verse.

"There's a way, and I know
That I have to go away."

My eldest looked at me in surprise and alarm. "No, not yet, Josh..."