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Monday, May 21, 2012

Some issues in semantics

Dear Mr. Baby:

Well-versed as I may be in the broad strokes of language acquisition, indicating no need for intervention on my part, as your dense and terrifying, disproportionately giant brain is hard at work at the mysteries of language all on its own - I still have a few notes for you here. It would just be easier if you would accept my conclusions about them, sooner rather than later.  I've been at this English block party a long time now, and you can trust me with matters of semantic import.  Also, there's Mommy's Sanity to think about.  There's that.


So here are just a few entries in your current lexicon that could use a little fine-tuning:

Hot:  Currently being used as an adjective for all items deviating greater than +/- 1 degree (F) from room temperature.  Also apparently fused in your mind with the meaning of apocalyptically lethal.  Naturally, this is the spawn of the seemingly innocuous seed that was planted by the explanation of why you can't touch the oven, which is still good and true.  But look, little dude: some of this crap is cold, to start with.  Also, I propose, in the name of All That Is Holy and Remotely Sane, to expand the temperature range a little.  Say to include things ranging from 50-85 degrees as acceptable to touch without blowing on them for twenty minutes or screaming like someone just severed your hand with a jackknife and is still sawing away at it like a salami. 

Ew: Also a little too all-encompassing.  What was once applied to things that were, generally speaking, gross: dog shit, cow shit, goose shit, and baby shit, you are now walking around the farm declaring everything Ew.  This can be a little insulting, if you are pointing at my face or making a commentary on the cleanliness of our house.  And honestly:  if something is covered in yogurt and snot and mashed into a crevice somewhere, that is Ew, but it's sort of bitchy to be complaining about it when everyone knows perfectly well that the only person who would cover a napkin and some fries in yogurt, chew on them, take them out of their mouth and wipe their nose with them, and then stuff them in between the drawers from whence they cannot be removed, is you.

Ow: Meant to be said when you have an injury or physical pain.  The existential crisis you have about whether or not you should have your pants checked before your nap, and whether not 'tis better to sleep for a couple of hours or to take arms and struggle, or really just any psychological discomfort brought on by someone requesting that you do something you think you might prefer not to - that is not ow.  People think I'm punching you, so cut it out.  

Baby:  You were a little young to be introducing the idea that the new baby is in mommy's belly, and that's my bad.  So, while you seem to have grasped baby in its usual meaning, you'\ve also expanded it to include everyone's tummy.  This makes for some hilarity when huge beer-drinking men say, ''What's this?'' Women, however...look kid, women are just going to be a different story in general than that of burly men with beer-bellies.  Dad will tell you the rest of these important facts, but typically, women don't appreciate you patting their bellies and saying baby.  Especially not at the yuppy grocery store, especially not if they're wearing yoga pants and have blonde streaky hair or drive a Lexus.   Plus, I think we let somebody's cat accidentally out of the bag, judging by the terse expressions and subsequent whispering that ensued the other day at the store post-baby declaration.  So maybe just keep your hands off the bellies of young and quite presumably unmarried women, and please, if you can't do that,  for the love of god, don't smile and say baby, baby as you're doing it.

Fall:  It's important to recognize that fall is generally used for sudden downward descents of an unintentional nature.  This last part is very central to the meaning of the word.  So when you say, ''Fall,'' because you were running through the house and (heh, heh) tripped on your own damn Leggo block, that's a pretty accurate story.  Looking down from your highchair at the pile of spaghetti and milk on Fred's head and commenting ''all fall,'' however, is a little less accurate, given that you just decided to toss it there.  See the difference?  Throw is the word you are looking for.  Or jackass. 

Finally, good buddy, I'm really proud of you being bilingual, and finally rocking some Polish vocab.  The fact that it means ''gimme'' is....well, it is what it is.  Battles for another day.  It's just that daj!, when you yell it in a demonic voice with that overly-determined expression on your face, sounds a lot like ''DIE.  DIIIEEEEEEE!'' to the Anglophones. Maybe just stop spinning your head in circles while you say it.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Yet Fresher Auditory Hell

Hello there, Mr. Baby:

It's been a while.  As you are aware, we have been quite busy you and I.   You, pondering the multifarious mysteries of the universe, and I cleaning up the aftermath of your robust and maladroit methodologies.  I haven't, really, any time to write letters of complaint - not if we're going to keep at bay the relentless tides of excruciatingly sharp-edged Leggo blocks, scraps of potentially once-important papers, cleverly smuggled rocks (selected, with apparent care, from the heaps of dry and clean stones for their high degree of mud and shit content), fistfuls of mashed and partially digested bread products, abused and beloved recycling items, bears, blankets, and those lovely cubes that intermittently dispense in perpetuum the cheerfuckingest arrangements of segments of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik ever imagined.  All of which you are employing in what seems to me to be quite a haphazard and unsystematic set of experiments centering around our good friend gravity.  (Again). To be honest, I haven't minded terribly being relegated to the less-than-glamorous role of lab janitor, because there are moments - beautiful and ephemeral moments - in which you actually entertain yourself. 

However, you occasionally hit a snag.  An item shaped like a star, to your angry befuddlement, will not allow itself to be crammed into a hole shaped like an octagon.  Your bears are fat and tall and will not, despite your best efforts, be confined to the space into which you have smashed a number of other tiny items without problems.  A car, overturned and pummeled into a tractor, cannot be removed with the same ease as it was earlier when it was on wheels.  Your sippy cup straw sometimes comes unplugged.

Gone are the days of screaming, of more screaming, of horrible sounds, and of the ambiguous and adamant NO.  No, from the apparently fathomless well of abrasive sounds you have extracted yet another menace to our sanity, another vicious assault on poise and composure.

Literature on the subject suggests that this sound be met with calm and silence.  Demonstrate, the experts say, that you are in control by not reacting to your toddler.

Okay, but:...I'd like to know this: have any of these assholes actually heard this fucking sound? 

In attempting to describe this, I am rendered helpless yet again by the exquisite hellishness of your sensory production.  Words fail us again, Mr Baby.  I suppose it's as if someone boiled together the auditory essence of: a crow being tortured in the throat of a seagull, of a cat being slowly flayed by dragging it across a chalkboard, of all the hypersensitive fire alarms in the middle of all the nights, of bagpipes played by tone-deaf amateurs, and, for good measure, even more tortured animals - all of the peacocks and cats who were ever shredded by predators or accidentally set on fire  - and distilled them into one incomprehensibly potent sound, yet still I think this description does it no justice.

The Whine.  

The Whine can permeate all things.  I feel certain my blood is actually curdled by the deranged and impossible frequency at which it resonates.  It is impossible to do anything, and impossible to not do anything, when the Whine is being broadcast. (Science backs me up here). And as you stand there, holding your truck upside down and at arms length, a Leggo block (a seemingly innocuous item but actually the harbinger of an auditory apocalypse) trapped in the driver's cabin, your face contorted into the almost comical but mostly terrifying expression required to birth this awful noise, I have but one thought in the milliseconds of silence that precede the Whine.  And that is this:

There has got to be a way to weaponize this shit.