On our Facebook group, listeners share the first big words they remember learning, including concentrate and physician. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “More First Big Words Learned as Kids”
A couple more examples from our Facebook discussion about the first big word you remember learning.
A couple of people talked about words that they learned when they were studying something around the house and they didn’t really know what it meant. Like Olivia Duenelle said that when she was five she learned the word concentrate, which came from prel concentrate shampoo. She said, I studied the bottle until I could say and spell that word with no clue what it meant.
And Linda Lohr said that her first word like that was physician. She said, I was preschool age and it was on the label of the canned milk that was put on the dinner table, probably said of the number of physicians who recommend this milk. She said, I read boxes and cans while conversations of older sisters and parents did not appeal to me. I had to ask what the word was and then loved the mush of the letters. Mush of the letters. Yeah. I can’t tell you the number of cereal boxes that I read as a kid. And I remember reading the word physician and understanding it as physican. I think I was also looking at something that was talking about physician recommended. And I kept thinking physican. It was a long time before I figured out that was physician.
You were reminding me, I had a conversation with my son about breaks, holiday breaks and summer breaks and not having books because there was no public library near us and you couldn’t check books out from school over the breaks and reading the backs of boxes and bottles and things. And he didn’t understand that because of course his room is loaded with books. I’m like, it was just different for me growing up. I read everything else that I read. I read my father’s newspapers. I read his, I read his police magazines. I read my, whatever I, I read the mail, whatever I could read, the calendar, you know, the inspirational quotes on my mom’s word of the day calendar over the, you know, the prayer of the day over the kitchen sink, whatever it was.
Exactly.
I remember holding a spoon in my fist eating Froot Loops and looking at all these cereal boxes that talked about contents may have settled during shipping and handling. That was like burned into my memory. I didn’t know what it meant.
Oh, and the other thing, when we bought the new kind of instant oatmeal, where the inside of the box had printed games and puzzles on the inside of the box and not just the outside. What a wonderful day that was. There was so much more to read at breakfast. Those were the days, weren’t they?
