Throughout this work of mastering our language a child is wont to eke out his deficiencies by bold strokes of originality. When, for example, a little girl towards the end of the second year, after being jumped by her father, wants him to jump her mother also, says, in default of the word "jump," "Make mamma high". Robert Hamerling, the Austrian poet, when a child, being told by his sick mother that he had not said something she wished him to say, answered, "I said it, but you didn't hear, you are poorly, and so blind in the ear". Quite pretty metaphors are sometimes hit upon, as when a little boy of two seeing his father putting a piece of wood on the fire said, "Flame going to eat it". A boy of twenty-seven months ingeniously said, "It rains off," for "The rain has left off". Once a girl about the same age as the boy hit on the idiom, "No two 'tatoes left," for "Only one potato is left". Pretty constructions sometimes appear in these make-shifts, as when a little girl of whom Mrs. Meynell tells, wishing to know how far she might go in spending money on fruit, asked, "What mustn't it be more than?"
The Interpreter of Words.
There is one part of this task of mastering our language which deserves especial notice, viz., the puzzling out of the meanings we put, or try to put, into our words.
Many good stories of children show that they have a way of sadly misunderstanding our words. This arises often from the ignorance of the child and the narrowness of his experience, as when a Sunday school scholar understood the story of the good Samaritan to mean that a gentleman came and poured some paraffin (i.e., oil) over the poor man. By a child's mind what we call accidentals often get taken to be the real meaning. A boy and a girl, twins, had been dressed alike. Later on the boy was put into a "suit". A lady asked the girl about this time whether they were not the twins, when she replied, "No, we used to be". "Twin" was inseparably associated in her mind with the similarity in dress.
It should be remembered, too, that we greatly add to the difficulties of the small student of our language by reason of the ambiguities of our expressions, and of our short and elliptical modes of speaking. It was a quite natural misconception when an American child, noting that children were "half price" at a certain show, wanted his mother to get a baby now that they were cheap. Many another child besides Jean Ingelow has been saddened at being told by her father or other grown-up who was dancing her on his knee that he must put her down as he "had a bone in his leg". Much misapprehension arises, too from our figurative use of language, which the little listener is apt to interpret in a very literal way, as when a small boy indignantly resented the statement of his mother who was driving him behind a rather skittish pony, "Pony has lost his head".
Children are desirous of understanding us and make brave efforts to put meanings into our words, sometimes falling comically short of the mark. A little fellow of two who had been called "fat" by his nurse when given his bath, afterwards proceeded to call his father "fat" when he saw him taking his bath. "Fat" had by a natural misconception taken on the meaning of "naked". It was a simple movement of childish thought when a little school-girl answered the question of the Inspector, "What is an average?" by saying, "What the hen lays eggs on". She had heard her mother say, "The hen lays so many eggs 'on the average' every week," and had no doubt imagined a little myth about this average.
It is the same with what is read to them. Where they do not recognise a meaning they invent one, or if necessary substitute an intelligible word for an unintelligible one. Young Hermiston in R. L. Stevenson's last story naturally enough said in speaking of his father, the "hanging judge," "It were better for that man if a milestone were bound about his neck". Similarly they will invert the relations of words in order to arrive at something like a meaning. Mr. Canton relates in his pretty sketch of a child, The Invisible Playmate, that his little heroine, who knew the lines in Struwwelpeter—
The doctor came and shook his head,
And gave him nasty physic too—