It’s so much fun to hear language be manhandled by kids who
are highly verbal but still preliterate. Their untrained ears find hilarious
and creative sounds in words that we adults have memorized too well to really
hear anymore.
When I was little, I used to think that the word “reconnoiter”
was actually a phrase: wreck and order. Whenever my mom suggested that we
reconnoiter a beach or a park, I thought we were going to trash the joint
and then clean up after ourselves—which is, actually, pretty much what we did.
A four-year-old featured on today’s Kids Say the Cutest
Things had a very sophisticated linguistic misunderstanding about her stuffed animal. Here’s how her mom
or dad explained it: “My daughter has a bear that has a Burberry pattern scarf.
The lady at the portrait studio asked what her bear was called and my 4 year
old responded, ‘His name is BurBear, but I don't know what his last name is.
It's starts with an E.’”
It makes so much sense that a four-year-old heard the “bear”
in Burberry, while we adults only hear the cha-ching of the cash register.
Photo: http://myviewsmyideas-rubal.blogspot.com
