The mere gathering of children's language would be much like collecting together a handful of flowers that should be all unique, single of their kind.In one thing, however, do children agree, and that is the rejection of most of the conventions of the authors who have reported them.They do not, for example, say "me is;" their natural reply to "are you?" is "I are." One child, pronouncing sweetly and neatly, will have nothing but the nominative pronoun.
"Lift I up and let I see it raining," she bids; and told that it does not rain, resumes, "Lift I up and let I see it not raining."An elder child had a rooted dislike to a brown corduroy suit ordered for her by maternal authority.She wore the garments under protest, and with some resentment.At the same time it was evident that she took no pleasure in hearing her praises sweetly sung by a poet, her friend.He had imagined the making of this child in the counsels of Heaven, and the decreeing of her soft skin, of her brilliant eyes, and of her hair--"a brown tress." She had gravely heard the words as "a brown dress," and she silently bore the poet a grudge for having been the accessory of Providence in the mandate that she should wear the loathed corduroy.The unpractised ear played another little girl a like turn.She had a phrase for snubbing any anecdote that sounded improbable."That," she said more or less after Sterne, "is a cotton-wool story."The learning of words is, needless to say, continued long after the years of mere learning to speak.The young child now takes a current word into use, a little at random, and now makes a new one, so as to save the interruption of a pause for search.I have certainly detected, in children old enough to show their motives, a conviction that a word of their own making is as good a communication as another, and as intelligible.There is even a general implicit conviction among them that the grown-up people, too, make words by the wayside as occasion befalls.How otherwise should words be so numerous that every day brings forward some hitherto unheard? The child would be surprised to know how irritably poets are refused the faculty and authority which he thinks to belong to the common world.
There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting-out of a child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much confidence in the chances of the hedge.He goes free, a simple adventurer.Nor does he make any officious effort to invent anything strange or particularly expressive or descriptive.The child trusts genially to his hearer.A very young boy, excited by his first sight of sunflowers, was eager to describe them, and called them, without allowing himself to be checked for the trifle of a name, "summersets." This was simple and unexpected; so was the comment of a sister a very little older."Why does he call those flowers summersets?" their mother said; and the girl, with a darkly brilliant look of humour and penetration, answered, "because they are so big." There seemed to be no further question possible after an explanation that was presented thus charged with meaning.
To a later phase of life, when a little girl's vocabulary was, somewhat at random, growing larger, belong a few brave phrases hazarded to express a meaning well realized--a personal matter.
Questioned as to the eating of an uncertain number of buns just before lunch, the child averred, "I took them just to appetize my hunger." As she betrayed a familiar knowledge of the tariff of an attractive confectioner, she was asked whether she and her sisters had been frequenting those little tables on their way from school.
"I sometimes go in there, mother," she confessed; "but I generally speculate outside."Children sometimes attempt to cap something perfectly funny with something so flat that you are obliged to turn the conversation.
Dryden does the same thing, not with jokes, but with his sublimer passages.But sometimes a child's deliberate banter is quite intelligible to elders.Take the letter written by a little girl to a mother who had, it seems, allowed her family to see that she was inclined to be satisfied with something of her own writing.The child has a full and gay sense of the sweetest kinds of irony.
There was no need for her to write, she and her mother being both at home, but the words must have seemed to her worthy of a pen: --"My dear mother, I really wonder how you can be proud of that article, if it is worthy to be called a article, which I doubt.Such a unletterary article.I cannot call it letterature.I hope you will not write any more such unconventionan trash."This is the saying of a little boy who admired his much younger sister, and thought her forward for her age: "I wish people knew just how old she is, mother, then they would know she is onward.
They can see she is pretty, but they can't know she is such a onward baby."Thus speak the naturally unreluctant; but there are other children who in time betray a little consciousness and a slight mefiance as to where the adult sense of humour may be lurking in wait for them, obscure.These children may not be shy enough to suffer any self-checking in their talk, but they are now and then to be heard slurring a word of which they do not feel too sure.A little girl whose sensitiveness was barely enough to cause her to stop to choose between two words, was wont to bring a cup of tea to the writing-table of her mother, who had often feigned indignation at the weakness of what her Irish maid always called "the infusion." "I'm afraid it's bosh again, mother," said the child; and then, in a half-whisper, "Is bosh right, or wash, mother?" She was not told, and decided for herself, with doubts, for bosh.The afternoon cup left the kitchen an infusion, and reached the library "bosh"thenceforward.
