Jake loves word games. Right now (at 24 months) his favorite verbal hobby is repeating any given phrase over and over and over and over and over and over and over, and then taking an oft-repeated sentence, and changing the last words. I.e., ``Twinkle twinkle little star'' mutatates into ``Twinkle twinkle doggy doggy'', ``Twinkle twinkle hog fat car''...you get the idea.
Well, recently Jake started to repeat: ``She beats me in the end.'' It took us a while to be completely sure of what he was exactly saying, and once we were convinced it was ``She beats me in the end'' we tried to figure out where this morbid little ditty came from. We finally realized it was a line from a library book he had gotten about a girl imagining that she was all sorts of different people (farmers, little red riding hood, etc.), and one of the lines goes:
I'm a deep sea diver
I have a dolphin friend
We have an underwater race
She beats me in the end
Well, true to Jake's habits, this phrase started getting processed through his verbal game transmorgifier, so he started saying things like: ``She beats me in the sandbox'' and ``She beats me in the forehead'' and so on. Needless to say, when I took him into daycare, I made a point of warning the teachers. I wonder if I should start carrying a copy of the book around with me to show people when, if for example, he tells the checkout person at the grocery store: ``She beats me in the fireplace.'' I just imagine that in itself would be sufficient ``evidence'' for the Child Protection commadoes to jack-boot our doors down.
Joel Parker
(joel@boulder.swri.edu)
