Practical English

Every semester when I was teaching, I started the first day with a brief history of the English language--paying particular attention to the fact that my language is practically nonsensical in many of it's practices. As I liked to say, "The only rule that will ALWAYS apply in English is that the semicolon is a superfluous piece of punctuation." And even that isn't entirely true (though, I have successfully managed to NEVER use a semicolon in ANY writing that I've ever done, which would seem to prove the point). Nothing stands to reason in our language. I blame the French and their influence. And the Germans. Most everything bad in the world can be traced to one or the other, I find.

The inconsistencies in our language are especially evident now that I have a toddler trying to suss out the many esoteric rules and regulations. All the time I hear him saying something that SHOULD make sense--irregular verbs changed into regular verbs, tenses shifted, word forms pronounced as they probably should be. And Libby finally caught an example of it on video.

For Christmas, I made Gabe a toolbox. First, we filled it with real tools (rather, Libby did, I knew it was a bad idea from the beginning), but that lasted less than an evening as he took the little hammer and started to bang on the furniture and jammed the screwdriver into a few things. The next day, Libby ran to Sears and picked up a set of plastic play tools which we replaced the other stuff with (except the tape measure, which we let him keep so he could be Measure Man still). We carefully went through the tools, several times, in fact, and named them all out.

He has since renamed some of them in a way that, really, makes sense. If you think about it, most of our tools end in "er." Pliers, hammer, screw driver, and so forth. Gabe extended this unwritten rule to the other tools that DON'T normally end in "er."

I'm not sure if he does it or not in this video because I haven't watched it all the way to the end (because it's so long and I'm a busy person), but he usually calls his pliers by the name of the character in Handy Manny, Squeeze. Except, usually, he even adds the "er" to the end of that, calling them "squeezers." (Note: after four attempts and about ten hours of letting Blogger try to figure out how to upload the original video, I caught Gabe while he was playing with his blocks and convinced him to list his tools for me. It's still long, but about a minute shorter than Libby's version, so hopefully it will work. Also note that Butts is making a cameo in this in her Johnny Jump-Up in the background. She loves the thing--unlike Gabe, who hated every second he was in there--but she's a bit sleepy as she's been a pretty horrid nap taker for the past few weeks and tends to run out of steam by 5:00. So don't expect her to "wow" you with her antics.).