It’s a Girl

Once upon a time, you knew it as “baby talk.” These days, the jargon term of art is “motherese.” As pointed out by the authors of The Scientist in the Crib, motherese — the sing-songy, high-pitched, repetitive burblespeak people seem to naturally engage in with babies — “seems to actually help babies solve the language problem.” In other words, gurgling at your tot helps her learn to speak.

Well, duh, right? Except that many language-development experts — especially William Fowler — also admonish parents to be sure to use proper grammar when constructing those simple sentences. This might seem obvious — Delphine hears plenty of sentences along the lines of “Look at the kitty cat, the soft, black kitty cat” — but less so when, um, the mother realizes that a good deal of her motherese is nonsense.

In its defense, this form of mommyspeak is nonsense in the classic Lewis Carroll sense — and not just because Delphine sometimes gets called Snickersnacks.

For example, if Delphine is coughing, suddenly she’s a coughy baby (hm, is “coughy” in the dictionary?), and her mother finds herself babbling, “Hello, there, coughy baby. Not like the coffee in daddy’s cup, no, no. Daddy drinks the coffee because it’s a gray day outside. And his coffee is Grade A from Guatemala, but that doesn’t mean there’s a gray day in his cup.”

Delphine also has a few unusual nicknames — chiefly, Bears. (Sometimes, it’s Pudgy Bears. But she has yet to be called Huggy Bear.) This, you might think, is a plural. Well, yes. But in this case, it’s a singular. Unless, of course, for reasons of euphony it gets to be both, as in the little ditty that goes, “The bears in her chairs” (clearly derived from Goodnight Moon) “was eating Bartlett pears.”

The plurals tend to go a little wild on occasion, as when the baby takes a turn in a swing at the park (it’s a “swingies,” not a swing), or when she’s hungry (she “gets the hungies,” instead of getting hungry).

Next up: the royal we. “No, no, we don’t like puréed turkey left over from Thanksgiving. We think it’s icky.” Who are we, Queen Victoria? Sheesh. Of course, some concession might be made for this oddity, given the fact that mommy and baby spend all day together, functioning as a two-headed monster.

Third: incorrect conjugations of the verb “to be.” Why this verb? Dunno. “You is the cutest. Is you the cutest? Yes, you is.”

I’ve decided not to worry about the disapproving scientists, for two reasons:

1) Delphine is certainly hearing plenty of “correct” English, both from her parents and from the people she encounters every day.

2) The “incorrect” English has an appealing element of play, of versatility, that might in fact be better at teaching Delphine the flexibility of language than a batch of rote, proper sentences.

And oh, yeah, how about reason No. 3:

3) It’s more fun for the parents.

Hopefully — a word used, as in this instance, “incorrectly” by so many people that this usage is becoming “correct” — she will learn both the rules of language and how to play with them.