Children and the Joints of Language

If we were to speak of the joints of language, we would be speaking of the explicit and implicit rules that join words to each other, and words to their meanings.

Perhaps it is an obvious point, but for children, young children of around 3 or 5, say, these joints are not as set. Or each word has multiple joints. There are possibilities of combination not available to the adult, or the typical adult.

We know already that children construct their own grammars. “Me do it” I would say as a child – not a sentence I had heard any adult speak, but made according to rules I had extracted from the adult world and adapted.  To some extent, children make their own language within, or sometimes against, the adult language.

What intrigues me at the moment is my son’s line in insults. In general, he finds them funny. He’s half-surprised by them. Curiosities that spring from this mouth. Here are a few, with some cursory comments:

Scubious potman. For the child, parts of language, what we would identify as prefixes, roots, suffixes, but also just individual sounds, can be snapped off and readily recombined in unexpected ways. This results in the kind of “portmanteau” words that Lewis Carroll and later Joyce would use for their own literary purposes and effects. Resetting of the joints of language, but also accessing the creative desire responsible for that endless resetting. 

Train fluff  Of course, with any word there is an expected axis of combination. If we write “train__” there is a kind of “chain of possibilities” for the blank space: carriage, track, driver, wreck. The child is able to easily discard and reach beyond this chain. To put it another way, the disparate is within easy reach. Not only that, but there’s clearly an energy or charge, often a laughter, that comes from joining the disparate, breaking the seals, dislocating the joints.

Sunlit patio Clearly, this is in a different category. A ready-made phrase reused, in this case with a certain comic venom. I think he’d had it read to him in a book about pirates in suburbia. It’s something he’s heard but not fully understood and is therefore a shard of language, opaque and object-like that can be used like a pointed stick. Because the phrase isn’t full of meaning, it can be injected with the child’s own glee or rage. This is presumably what parts of language are for the child..  objects a-glow with meaning, not yet fully metabolised. Hieroglyphs of a world into which they have entered at an oblique angle. There are other instances where he understands a phrase but enjoys matching it with a dissonant tone - "Christmas decoration!" - and so tilting its meaning. Perhaps ‘sunlit patio’ was in fact in this latter category.

I leave you with three more:

Eyeball bat

Nipple bin

Neck fight