Learning new words
Language is a wondrous thing. Among other stuff, it is a way for us to master and grasp the world we inhabit and engage with. And for a little boy (or girl), who is just starting to learn how to talk, language does not only help him fathom his world, but forges a whole new world, distinguishing the toddler’s realm of life from the baby’s mute beginnings. A world that can be communicated, shared and explained, that can be organized, categorized and delineated, that is imbued with a new sense of structure, distinctions and precision. A world at your fingertips.
Nowhere is this more apparent to me, than through the way our boys use the word bye-bye. Bye-bye is the newest edition to our son’s vocabularies, a steadily growing and rather arbitrary aggregation of words and sounds, like woof-woof, boom, yuck, floor, carrot, more, door, and now bye-bye. But unlike their previous words, which they mainly use for identifying affirmations or for issuing demands (pointing to a dog, and saying woof-woof; handing me their plate and saying more), bye-bye is a whole category unto itself, that most of all exhibits and exudes a new-found sense of mastery. Saying bye-bye is no more, no less, than suddenly owning the world they inhabit. Yes, they will also say it as a greeting of goodbye, as they wave off a visitor (or unprompted try to send them packing), and yes, it is also a way of communicating, to let me know that they are done with dinner (bye-bye, waving at their plates).
But as already stated, this is not where it ends. With the small and repetitive bye-bye, our boys are chiseling out a hierarki in the world, setting themselves apart from the objects they wave at. Not only will they say goodbye to practically everything they discard or leave behind, constantly confirming that they are in fact in a position to cast of objects or exchange one surrounding for another at will (and swelling with self-importance as they do so). But they will wave goodbye to things they positively love just for the sake of being able to do so. They will literally sacrifice the one thing they will beg, plead and cry for (TV), just for the sake of acting out this manifestation of power and agency.
And this is where Bambi enters the stage. Having a hard time getting your toddler to accept that tele-time is over? Struggling to make your toddler head towards bed? Not us. Nope. The mere fact that they get to bid Bambi – their favored animated pasttime – bye-bye, makes bedtime a breeze. There is no howling as we grapple for the remote. No screeching as a tiny being hurls himself red- and wet-faced to the floor. No running away in opposite directions. Instead there is a highly determined, dead-serious and almost disturbingly gleeful chorus of bye-byes, as our little men wave resolutely at the TV, and turn their backs demonstratively at the livingroom. With bye-bye they are truly standing over and against the objects that surround them, and they are lording it over them, domineering them the best they can. They are practically intoxicated by their newfound sense of power, as they inform both livingroom and movie, that their services are no longer required, that they will now take their leave. And that there is nothing either can do about it. It is equally amazing and perplexing to watch how two syllables literally makes a world of difference in the life of these little people. Changing their outlooks, and transforming their behaviour.
And apart from making our evenings a whole lot easier, both mentally and on the ears, it is also something of a learning experience for us grown-ups. It is true, that you learn something new everyday when you are surrounded by children, but in some surprisingly apt and retrospective manner, this development makes renewed sense of some of the philosophical theories of language I studied at university. I’m not talking about modern or contemporary philosophy of language here, but of more obscure German philosophers like Schelling and Adorno. Philosophers who both explored how the subject (the human being) distinguish itself from it’s object (the world) through language, resulting in a dualism or a break between humankind and everything else. What ties Schelling and Adorno together in this context, is their mutual negative stance towards this way of inhabiting the world, which for all it’s practicalities (like the human ability to communicate with one another), also reduces the world to the words we apply to it, and confines it’s plethora of particularities and multitude of wonders to our narrow and limiting pre-conceived concepts and linguistic categories.
For Schelling this especially comes to the fore in relation to the divine, a God who’s amorphic boundlessness and indivisible nature is violated whenever we try to confine it in prose and description; And for Adorno in relation to the whole world and realm of objects (including humankind itself, as objects to one another), a world which diversity and richness we violate by reducing it to our narrow modes of concepts. As fascinating as I found these theories to be, I always struggled grasping this underlying idea of an inherent violence of language. That the mere conceptualization of our surroundings could be a way of diminishing and domineering. Not any more. It is playing out daily in front of my very eyes.
I am sure, that it will come as no surprise to anyone who knows a toddler, that these little people likes nothing more than being in charge, or at least to pretend to be so. But that the power-struggle you have going on at 22 months are not just with your parents, but with the whole world of inanimate stuff, is a surprise to me. What a big world a tiny person inhabits! A world where all is new, few things are fixed, and where bye-bye means you are in charge.
I am happy to say though, that so far they only wave at me when I leave. I get a regular goodbye. But as the twos and their accompanying terrors are rapidly approaching, I dread the day I might be getting the Bambi-treatment. In a not so far away future, they might start goodbying me, as determinedly and gleefully as if I were the couch. They’ll take their bid for power to the next level, and hurl their little words so hard at me, that I just might have to duck and hide for cover. As Wittgenstein said, when it comes to language:
“Don’t look for the meaning, look for the use”.
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∼ TDD 2016 ∼
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