Spell the Word

As anyone who has recently shopped for children's electronics or just walked down those GREEN isles in the stores knows, there are a ton of TV games, hand-held games, computer and video games, being marketed to kids and their parents. Some try to pass themselves off as "educational," but they just start blurring together as a giant "VTagTechDigiDS."

We are the proud owners of a Speak & Spell, a toy that kept many an idle hand busy circa 1986. During a car ride was the best time to engage in a round of SAY IT or SPELL THE WORD____. It apparently still is. For now....

Translation

I just received these tiny food cutters in the mail. They have the weirdest packaging copy:

Gag Me With a Spoon

ennedy, Kennedy, what are they feeding you? Tonight I took cookie cutters to pork chops in an attempt to get the girl to eat meat (they were thin). She didn't even want to touch the heart smeared with ketchup, knowing mom was up to something. I told her they were chicken nuggets (lying=bad). She was too smart for that. Comments heard frequently these days: "For REAL!" "That's GROSS!" "No you did not!" I am living with a 4-year-old vegetarian valley girl with a slight twang to her obstinate speech. Rad....

Alpha-Bits

Made by Girl

I can see this in Kennedy's room. Or mine with some random word thrown in: EAT or DREAM or TINTINNABULATION....

Pillow Talk

Me (starting a pillow fight with Kennedy): schtk schtk schtk schtk.
Kennedy: It's not a gun, mommy.
Me: No, that's just my pillow fight noise....
Kennedy: This is a Weapon Free School.

(Wow they start drilling that in early, don't they?)

Derriengue

This is the word that will haunt 13-year-old Neetu Chandak for the rest of her life. She misspelled it during the National Spelling Bee Championship finals. But, if the word was pronounced as it should have been, with it's Spanish root, rolled double "rr," would she have gotten it right? The announcer even pointed out the lack of rolled "rr" in their pronunciation of derriengue, but dismissed it as an Anglicized form of the word. Really? It seemed like there were an abundance of French words in this round: blancmange, baignoire, Neufchâtel, and they were all pronounced with French gusto, er, flaire. I would think the "American" pronunciation of Neufchâtel would include a hard, audible "F." Same with the "C" in blancmange. Maybe the announcer was just using "Anglicized" as a euphemism for "lazy."

And what of all the Spanish-speaking newscasters who have no accent whatsoever, until they come to a Spanish word, at which point it's like we've switched gears, to Telemundo? But it's still Anglicized news, right? By these standards Cesar Chavez Street should be "See-zir Chavez," not "Say-czar." It will be interesting to see what is considered "Anglicized" pronunciation in a few years, if we continue on this bilingual route, in states with large Hispanic populations. Speaking of, what ever happened to Esperanto? Has that ever taken off?

And It Has Been Written

shamrock, originally uploaded by melissa.coats.

Kennedy has officially written her name! I am kind of shocked -- in a few short weeks she has gone from what looked like EKG lines to Xs and Os, and now all the letters of her name.

Personal note: I used to write my name backwards when I was little, as if you should hold the paper up to a mirror to read it. Freaked my mom out. I also practiced penmanship in the Bible, which is a big NO NO. What can I say, I liked the feel of the paper!

Mardi Gras

Word cloud of my blog c/o www.wordle.net. Go see what you're talking about....

Word 08 - Updated

The American Dialect Society voted “bailout” as the word of the year. Now, I have linguistics as an interest in my profile for a reason -- I really do care about this kind of stuff, and want to share it with you, all four of you that are reading :-) But of course this post isn't about some stuffy old Dialect Society, but about the words that I think should have been, and quite possibly were, at the top of their list:

Stimulus - Perfect word on so many levels.

Blog - Everyone has a blog now. Everyone. Even the White House.

Facebook - Let's face it, this word is thrown around so much in conversation that it has taken on a life of its own. Plus, it means something else entirely in verb form....

HockeyMom - We love to hate her....

Pirates - specifically Somali. Have we ever heard about so many pirates in this day and age as we have in the past year?

Layoff - That was a biggie in our house this year!

Upcycle - It's good for the environment.
....

Any one have any others they'd like to add?

Matters

Ever since Kennedy has started to “read,” or at least identify letters and their sounds, she has always associated the letter M with Mommy. And, even with her knack for brand identification (i.e. Disney, Macintosh, even the Texas Lottery logo), whenever she sees the golden arches of McDonalds, she always yells, “It’s an M for Mommy!” This excerpt from a new book brings to mind that sweet innocence:

The great majority of languages start the word for "mother" with an m sound. The word mammal comes from the mammary gland. Which comes from baby talk: mama. To sound like a grownup, we refine mama into mother; the Romans made it mater, from which: matter. And matrix. Our word for the kind of animal we are, and our word for the stuff that everything is made of, and our word for a big cult movie all derive from baby talk.

Go on, read more. It gets better.