A listener shares a story on our Facebook group about how a child’s misunderstanding illustrates the power of metaphor. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Cows in the Ocean”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
When young children are first beginning to use language to describe the world, they come up with some wonderful metaphors.
And we had an example of that on our Facebook group from Donna Apter, who lives in West Hartford, Connecticut.
She wrote, at around the age of three, my dad had traveled to the U.S. with his family on a long journey by sea from Europe during the large wave of immigration at the turn of the 20th century.
Having been born and raised on his father’s dairy farm in what was Austria-Hungary at the time, he had once shared with me how he had felt such wonder and amazement upon discovering at that tender age that in this new world there were cows in the middle of the ocean.
What?
He’s been gone 25 years now, and it still warms my heart every time I think of this precious image of my father as a three-year-old, assuming that the recurrent sound of the ship’s foghorn had offered him the opportunity to hold on to a piece of his old world, cows mooing, as he transitioned to the whole new life that awaited him in America.
Oh, that’s adorable. Isn’t that gorgeous?
Cows on the ocean. I was thinking, maybe sea cows, maybe they were manatees, but no.
I know, I was completely confused. How adorable is that?
But the power of metaphor, right? That kids see that sometimes escapes us.
Yeah, it’s true.
We’d love to hear the stories that you tell in your family about the things that somebody said that you still remember and you still all talk about.
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