When trying to make themselves understood, kids can be wonderfully creative with language. A couple of examples sent in by listeners: lasterday, referring to any time in the past, and spicy, describing bath water that’s too hot. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Kids Say it Wrong but Funnily”
We’ve talked before about words that kids make up to make themselves understood when they just can’t reach for the right word. We got a couple of examples of those recently.
Sharon Bulger wrote to say that her two-year-old used to use the word laster day. Oh yeah, that’s a a fairly common one.
Yeah, for anything that’s happened in the past, like not necessarily just yesterday, but something that happened two hours ago. It happened last year because it’s in the past.
And then Angela De Los Santos talked about how when she was working as a nanny, she had a charge, a young child, who used to use the word spicy to mean hot as in temperature. So the kid would, you know, stick a toe in the bathtub and say, oh, it’s too spicy.
I love that. That reminds me. It’s a little different, but my son used to have a problem with words beginning with S and P. Actually, many children do.
So things weren’t spicy. They were Picey. Picey. And they weren’t spiders. They were Piders. And did you eat Piscetti?
No, we didn’t eat Piscetti. Oh, you didn’t? But it was cute, and it’s something I remember. Now that he’s 11, he’s embarrassed by it, but I still tell the stories.
To hundreds of thousands of people, right? To hundreds of thousands of people. I love you, son.
