Susan from Seattle, Washington, has observed her toddler granddaughter starting to exclaim Uh-oh! when something goes amiss. Is that something she picked up from adults, or do adults pick it up from children? By 18 months, children have already developed a repertoire of two-word expressions, and they acquire uh-oh at a time when they’re starting to learn about values between yes and no, and nuances of meaning. They begin to learn, for example, that uh-oh can express dismay but not worry. The interjection uh-oh! is what linguists call a discourse marker, a small utterance that, in this case, changes what we expect to hear. This is part of a complete episode.
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
If someone’s got melon, it means they’re smart. The expression most likely arose because of the resemblance between a melon and a human head. Several other foods are associated with having brains, including a cabbage, a gourd, and even a...
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