The owner showed me into the basement of a house that I was interested in renting. As we descended the steps, she pointed out a wooden sculpture of a Mallard, telling me that the previous tenant had left the bird there as a warning to tall people to bend their heads to clear the overhang. After I moved in, my daughter placed some of my youngest grandchild’s toys in the basement; when our play requires a trip downstairs, Myah apparently takes great pleasure in demonstrating her knowledge of the difference between “duck” the noun, and “duck” the verb. As we walk down the steps, she points to the mallard and says, “Duck.” When I approach the low point of the overhang, she warns me: “Duck.”
Myah is newly 5 years old, and I marvel each day on her blossoming use of the language that I love. When I show her something of interest, she will tell me that she had seen it “earlier.” She watches YouTube videos produced by people from other countries, and I fully expect her to start pronouncing the striped horse as if it rhymed with “Debra.” Myah’s cousin, my first grandbeauty, is in his first year at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Xavion knows of my passion for the language, and once ruefully told his mother about a text. “I sent Cool Papa (me) a run-on sentence.” He also corrected me during a jocular conversation when I told him that he had snorted: “That was a sharp exhalation through the nostrils.” (I heard that and thought, “My man.”) In another exchange he chuckled about my response to his answer to a question, noting that I might have expected a comment that was more “whimsical.”
It is possible that everyone else’s child has demonstrated a development of language usage that is greater than what I am recording here. In that regard, I say that I am in competition with no one. I am recording what I have found to be amusing and remarkable to me. On a recent tour of Indianapolis Public School 57, Parent Teachers Organization members Hillary Brown and Michelle Pleasant showed me around the old school. The massive library reminded me of the libraries of my youth, and Myah has libraries both at home and my house. In one of the classrooms there was a large sign illustrating the noun and the verb, with “person, place or thing” beneath one word, and pictures of actions and activities beneath the other. This should be amusing and remarkable to Myah, who is also slowly learning present tense and past tense. I gently guide her toward the proper usage and when she exclaims that her doll “eated” all of her pretend food, I correct that expression to “ate.” (Myah has only recently embraced the proper pronunciation of “pretend.” For many months, it was “betend.”)
Myah has been using the word “actually” in the proper context for some time, but she amused me one day, when she stretched a small tape measure against the side of one of my bookcases, and murmured to me that, “apparently, this is ….” I still do not know where she encountered the adverb “apparently,” and how she knew the correct application of it in a conversation, but we learn words before we learn the definitions for them. My learning was conducted in silence, as I quietly read the books I gathered from Carnegie’s library. Myah’s learning is out loud, as the adults around her exclaim and express, and her YouTube friends discuss and demonstrate.
Myah has the nouns and verbs. Onward to adverbs.
cjon3acd@att.net