I wasn’t there, but reliable sources say this exchange happened last night while reading Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse at bedtime:
BOY: Mouse.
HRH: Yes.
BOY: [LOOKS AT NEXT PICTURE] Mices. Two mices.
HRH: Almost! When there’s just one, it’s a mouse. When there are two, they’re called mice.
BOY: Two mice.
HRH: Yup.
[NEXT PAGE]
BOY: One mouse… two mice.
HRH told me that it was incredible to sit there and watch Liam recognise that there should be a collective term for several of one kind of thing, and extrapolate it from a word he’d heard us use. “Language development is so mind-blowing,” he said. “I am so the wrong person to be teaching him this.” Which isn’t true, of course, but points to how overwhelming it can be to observe a small creature learn like this.
Can you stab him with something blunt for me every time he says stupid shit like that?
Thanks.
t!
I verbally smacked him when he said it, but we can up that to blunt objects, yes.
This sort of thing always reminds me of how f—ed up the English language is. Because it really should be “mouses”. . . and “brang” and “doos” and “telled.”
And yes with the observing of small creatures adjusting their very logical linguistic assumptions to this f—ed up language.
That’s what I found interesting, actually: he didn’t say ‘mouses’, he said ‘mices’. He’d heard us say ‘mice’, and pluralized it.
One of my favourite plural stories came from an English prof in university, who talked to us about the effects of multiple cultural invasions on language. Our term ‘children’ is actually a double plural, as ‘childer’ and ‘childen’ are each plurals of ‘child’ in different dialects. So in effect, when we say ‘children’ we’re saying ‘childses’.
Child s s. Yish!
We could do both – you verb from you, and stab on my behalf.
t!
Double whammy!
Liam corrected him the other day: Liam said something, HRH said “Yeah”, and Liam said “Yes“, just the way we correct him when he says ‘yeah’. It was hilarious.