There is one part of this child’s work of learning our language of which I have said hardly anything, viz., the divining of the verbal content, of the meaning we put or try to put into our words. A brief reference to this may well bring this study of childish linguistics to a close.
The least attention to a child in the act of language-learning will show how much of downright hard work goes to the understanding of language. If we are to judge by the effort required we might say that the child does as much in deciphering his mother-tongue as an Oriental scholar in deciphering a system of hieroglyphics. Just think, for example, how many careful comparisons the small child-brain has to carry out, comparisons of the several uses of the word by others in varying circumstances, before he can get anything approaching to a clear idea, answering even to such seemingly simple words as ‘clean,’ ‘old’ or ‘clever’. The way in which inquiring children plague us with questions of the form, ‘What does such and such a word mean?’ sufficiently shows how much thought-activity goes in the trying to get at meanings. This difficulty, moreover, persists, reappearing in new forms as the child pushes his way onwards into the more tangled tracts of the lingual terrain. It is felt, and felt keenly, too, when most of the torments of articulation are over and forgotten. Many of us can remember how certain words haunted us as uncanny forms into the nature of which we tried hard, but in vain, to penetrate.
Owing to these difficulties the little learner is always drifting into misunderstanding of words. Such misapprehensions will arise in a passive way by the mere play of association in attaching the word especially to some striking feature or circumstance which is apt to present itself when the word is used in the child’s hearing. In this way, for example, general terms may become terribly restricted in range by the incorporation of accidentals into their meaning, as when a Sunday school scholar rendered the story of the good Samaritan by saying that a gentleman came by and poured some paraffin (i.e., oil) over the poor man. A word may have its meaning funnily transformed by such associative suggestions, as when a little girl, being told that a thing was a secret, remarked, ‘Well, mamma, ’ou (you) can whisper it in my ear’. As this example shows, a child in his ‘concreting’ fashion tries to get sensible realities out of our names. A mask was called by a boy of six a ‘grimace,’ this abstract name standing to his mind for the grinning face. A like tendency shows itself in the following quaint story. 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. A somewhat similar effect of association of ideas is seen in the quaint request of the little girl M. that her mamma should ‘smell’ the pudding and make it cool. The action of bringing the face near an object yet so as not to touch it was associated with smelling, as in the little girl who, according to Mr. Punch, had her sense of propriety shocked by some irreverent person who did not “smell his hat” when he took his seat in church. Moral expressions get misunderstood in much the same manner. A little girl of three and a half years, pretending that her mother was her little girl, said: ‘You mustn’t do anything on purpose’. The usual verbal context of this highly-respectable phrase (e.g., ‘You did it on purpose’) had in the child’s mind given it a naughty meaning.
With these losings of the verbal road through associative by-paths may be taken the host of misapprehensions into which children are apt to fall through the ambiguities of our words and expressions, and our short and elliptical modes of speaking. Thus 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.[[116]] With this may be compared the following: Jean Ingelow tells us she can well remember how sad she was made by her father telling her one day after dancing her on his knee that he must put her down as he ‘had a bone in his leg’.[[117]] Much misapprehension arises, too, from our figurative use of language, which the little listener is apt to interpret in a very literal way. It would be worth knowing what odd renderings the child-brain has given to such expressions as ‘an upright man,’ ‘a fish out of water,’ and the like.
In addition to these comparatively passive misapprehensions there are others which are the outcome of an intellectual effort, the endeavour to penetrate into the mystery of some new and puzzling words or expression. Many of us have had our special horror, our bête noire among words, which tormented us for months and years. I remember how I was plagued by the word ‘wean,’ the explanation of which was very properly, no doubt, denied me by the authorities, and by what quaint fancies I tried to fill in a meaning.
As with words, so with whole expressions and sayings. It was a natural 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’. Again, most of us know what queer renderings the child-mind has given to Scripture language. Mr. James Payn tells us that he knew a boy who for years substituted for the words, ‘Hallowed be thy name,’ ‘Harold be thy name’.[[118]] In this and similar cases it is not, as might be supposed, defective hearing—children hear words as a rule with great exactness—it is the impulse to give a familiar and significant rendering to what is strange and meaningless.[[119]] A friend of mine when a boy was accustomed on hearing the passage, ‘If I say peradventure the darkness shall cover me,’ etc., to insert a pause after ‘peradventure,’ apprehending the passage in this wise: "If I say ‘Peradventure!’—the darkness," etc. In this way he turned the mysterious ‘peradventure’ into a mystic ‘open sesame,’ and added a thrilling touch of magic to the passage. My friend’s daughter tells me that on hearing the passage, “I ... visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, ... and show mercy unto thousands,” she construed the strange word ‘generation’ to mean an immense number like ‘billion,’ and was thus led to trouble herself about God’s seeming to be more cruel than kind.[[120]]
In some cases, too, where the language is simple enough a child’s brain will find our meaning unsuitable and follow a line of interpretation of its own. Mr. Canton relates that his little heroine, who knew the lines in Strumpelpeter—
The doctor came and shook his head,
And gave him nasty physic too—
was told that she would catch a cold, and that she at once replied, “And will the doctor come and shook my head?”[[121]] It was so much more natural to suppose that when the doctor came and did something this was carried out on the person of the patient.