What’s the first really big word you remember learning? For one listener, the word was conflagration. For Martha, it was logical, a word she repeated after watching “Sylvester the Cat” cartoons, followed in short order by theological. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “First Really Big Word For Kids”
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. Do you remember the first big word you learned, the one that you just couldn’t stop saying after you learned it? Gerald Blondin asked that question on our Facebook group, and he said that for him, he was about four or five years old, and the word was conflagration, meaning a big fire. His grandmother taught him that word.
And I was thinking about that, Grant. The first big word that I learned was logical. Logical. Logical. To me, I was a tiny kid, and I think it was from Sylvester the Cat, the cartoons where he would say, that sounds logical. And so I would walk around, you know, I think in diapers, you know, saying, that sounds logical. And then my dad was a professor at a theological seminary. So theological came very quickly after that. So I would just, you know, walk around little things saying theological. Little Martha saying theological.
Yeah. How about you? Do you remember your first big word? I don’t. I remember my first four-letter word. Taught to me on the back of a school bus by another naughty child. Oh, that’s a whole other segment, isn’t it? Yeah. The one beginning with F. We’ll talk about that person-to-person. One of our live shows, maybe.
But if you’d like to talk to us about the long word that you learned and what it meant to you, 877-929-9673. Or email us words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.
