Parents of a toddler may wonder if Uh-oh should count as their child’s first word. Yep, and it’s actually pretty common first word for little kids, since mishaps are things they learn about early on. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “First Word “Uh-Oh””
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.
Grant, we had an interesting question on our Facebook page, and I’m wondering about your thoughts.
Okay.
Tiffany Brenner-Guerrero wrote, the first word, if it is one, used in correct context out of our 13-month-old’s mouth was, -oh.
Oh.
I see it’s in various dictionaries, but we’re having a fun family debate over whether it should be permanently on the record books as the first.
Curious as to your thoughts. What do you think? Is -oh the baby’s first word?
Yes. I mean, if that’s the first one they heard, probably it’s the first word that they recognized in context.
It’s an interjection. We have a whole category of language that is interjection, exclamation.
Some of it doesn’t fit syntactically into normal sentences because it’s an interjection. It appears just kind of on its own, kind of as an adjunct to a larger moment.
So, hey, it’s kind of like that. It’s technically a word, but it behaves as an interjection or exclamation.
Yeah. So, yeah, totally. -oh.
And that’s a lot of children’s first word because we teach danger right away.
Okay. And -oh is the way that you indicate danger to a child.
Yeah. So Tiffany shouldn’t feel bad about the baby saying -oh first, right?
For a while there, we had a really lovely woman in Brooklyn who was taking care of my son while my wife and I worked.
And Carol was from Trinidad. And so she taught my son a particular form of that, which was ——
And so this little one-year-old boy would walk over to the very hot radiator in a Brooklyn Brownstone apartment and point at it and then wave his finger in this particular way, just like Carol did, and go, ——
I don’t know if that’s a word, but the message was received. There was a semantic concept to it.
That’s fantastic. Was it his first word?
No, no. Oh, that’s too bad. His first word was blue, I believe.
Blue? Yeah. Really?
All colors were boo for a long time.
Oh, really? He loved blueberries.
My first word was b.
Oh, what’s that? Bird?
No, bird. Bird. I was pointing at a bird and I said b.
Nobody was listening when I started talking. My brother probably heard it and nobody else.
That’s fine. Well, they’re listening now.
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