Twitter user @crookedroads770 observed that his two-year-old son referred to an owl as a wood penguin. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Wood Penguin”
I loved this tweet from someone whose handle is CrookedRoads770.
He wrote, I generally think of myself as an okay father, but somehow I forgot to teach my two-year-old son what an owl was, and he thought it was called a wood penguin.
Oh, that’s adorable.
Isn’t that so cute?
A wood penguin.
Of course, it makes sense, right?
That’s very adorable.
And of course, the thread that followed it resulted in a lot of other examples like that.
Somebody named Terry Cloth said, one of my nephews thought that bats were called space kittens.
Oh, that’s nice. This is great.
But it’s really cool, isn’t it? I mean, that’s the way our brains work.
I mean, think about the word porpoise, which comes from Latin words porcus and piscis, meaning pig fish, because that is kind of what they look like.
You see those for the first time, you apply a different name to them.
Pig fish. Share your pig fish stories with us, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.
