Zeigen

I mentioned previously that Sammy is rhyming a lot, and he’s continuing to do that.

In addition, he’s started using the word “badger” as a sort of dummy word to fill in for any vocabulary that he’s forgotten or doesn’t know. Why “badger”? Search me. In usage, it’s somewhat random, almost like how the Smurfs would use the word “smurf” sprinkled haphazardly in their sentences.

(I was a linguistics major in college — 20 years ago — and I know there’s probably a good linguistics term for this, but even after browsing through a bunch of linguistics vocab sites, I couldn’t find the right one. It’s probably some form of metonymy or synecdoche, but only because everything is.)

Example:

“What’s this that the bear is wearing?” (pointing to a picture of a bear wearing a red scarf in a picture book that Phil and Erin gave him for Christmas)

“A nice badger.”

His speech is usually clear and he almost always uses the right word if he knows it, but every now and then he makes an amusing mistake. Just now Kimi’s Aunt Jennifer and Uncle Tom stopped by to drop off some toys that Sammy had left at their house last night. Kimi noted Tom’s haircut. Since Sammy likes to be included in the conversation, Sammy pointed out that “I got a haircut too.” (Weeks ago.) So Jennifer asked, “Where did you get a haircut?” Sammy: “At the barber…(pause)…cue.”

This entry was posted by Stephen on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Sammy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.