10/6/94

Out of the Mouths of Babes

The First Word, that moment every parent dreams of. Eureka! Gevalt!

    My wife and I used to speak English to each other, full sentences like: "What should we do this evening?" Then one day, we talked about having a kid. My wife must have misunderstood me, because she wound up having many at one time, although triplets was never up for discussion.
    They came home from the hospital and cried for months. My wife and I learned to communicate above the din by getting a word in when we could, syntax be damned: "More milk!" she would say. "A sec," I would respond. Or, she: "Not again!" Me: "On the carpet?"
    Then one day someone said: "Ghee."
    "Did you say that?" "No, I thought it was you."
    A child had uttered. We were speechless.
    In no time, "Ghee" became the lingua franca of the household.
    "Ghee," Donna said.
    "Ghee," Odelia answered.
    "Ghee," Nomi agreed, after some thought.
    My wife and I thought this was very cute, and it became our catchword too, an eloquent bon mot for every occasion, though we gave it more scope with our talent for inflections.
    We might never have gone beyond that had a toothless child not discovered that by pushing the tongue off the front of the palate, she could speak Russian.
    "Da!" she said.
    "Da, da!"
    For weeks, that was all: "Da." It made life simple because it meant everything.
    "Ghee," I reminded them one day, and they looked at me like I was a nattering idiot speaking some extinct language.
    We have a little black cat who never learned to talk, obey or understand, never even learned to respond to her own name. Her name, for some ridiculous reason, is Rover. Therein was our next linguistic triumph.
    "Vova." We were overjoyed: baby talk with a British accent! It became the new family vocabulary, though I still could not unlearn "Ghee."
    This was about the time the babes learned to giggle, crawl and vivisect. This was also when the cat learned to respond to her name, by jumping out a window.
    The moment every parent dreams of was fast approaching for us: The First Word. Ours came in spectacular, miraculous fashion.
    My sister-in-law had just given us her video camera. The second time I picked up the thing, I was shooting an intriguing sequence, "Mother Tying Toddler's Shoelace," when the tiny child in focus suddenly grinned and said, with perfect clarity: "New shoes."
    Eureka!
    Gevalt!

"DADDY'S HOME."
    "Hello Daddy I ate my whole lunch but I did bumped my nose when the music was playing and I missed you but Hagit has chicken pox and a little children in gan did throwed sand in my hair so we were playing in the sandbox like Ernie in the video on Purim we don't want to see clowns because they're afraid of me and I have a headache in my tummy so the dish ran away with the spoon and I'm a good girl like Gera who's a boy are you listening because maybe you have lice like Mummy said maybe I have so what's for supper."
    "And Nomi smacked me."
    "Because she was pinching Donna and I wanted to pinch Donna first so I said to Leah that Delia was naughty and Leah thought Donna was Delia so she shouted 'you're a naughty girl' at the wrong girl who was the good girl so I pulled her hair and that's why Delia smacked Donna, I mean Nomi smacked Delia which is me."
    "Did not!"
    "Did too!"
    I asked my wife for a translation and she snarled a guttural intonation that I understood to mean "don't ask."

NOW THAT they've mastered the Queen's English -- accent and all -- what's left for a troika of three-and-a-half-year-olds to do is humiliate their father by already knowing more Hebrew than he does.
    Efraim Kishon was right when he said that Hebrew is the mother tongue you learn from your children. They're bringing home from nursery school an odd mix of teacher admonitions, Bialik ditties, Russian toilet words, brachot, body parts, juvenile effronteries and nyah-nyah taunts, and every obnoxious Israeli way to bray, browbeat or bawl out a person, much-loved classics such as  "dai!" "lo rotza!" and "tafsik!"
    On the other hand, they did teach me the Hebrew for such useful words as "snail" and "thumb."
    And most recently, they've adopted this latest horror in linguistic refinement: cross-accentization. All of a sudden, one day Donna started singing, liltingly, soulfully and despite all of our efforts: "Mar-r-ry, Mar-r-ry --" with the guttural, rolling resh rather than our cherished soft ar "-- quite contr-r-rar-r-ry...." This was a double-dilly, because to correct this aberration, I had to insist they return to an earlier mistake: the double-yoo'ed ar ("Mawy, Mawy, quite contwawy"). It was like pulling teeth. Our friend Roz -- or "R-r-r-oz" -- was, once again, "Woz."  That, at least, was a legitimate English mispronunciation.

AS THEY began to pick up this new tongue, it presented a new problem: my wife and I lost our language of secret-telling. We agreed it was a good idea for the little 'uns to learn the official language of the country we live in, but we big 'uns had to keep a step ahead.
    We devised an alternative mode of verbalization to stymie their comprehension. We commenced to intercommunicate using sesquipedalia -- that is, multisyllabic,  high-falutin' terminologies. It worked until they learned those words too. (God forbid I should brag about my children in a Jewish newspaper, but when they were two they were already saying words like  "stethoscope" and "paleontologist"; at three they could say "hypochondriac." It was actually the short words, like "no" and "bedtime," that they couldn't grasp.)
    Then my wife invented a complex communication that successfully flummoxed the children, and me. "The dee-oh-cee-tee-oh-ar said we should give N the trufot after les repas surreptitiously suffused in em-i-el-kay, comprendez?" Apparently her theory was that if I couldn't understand what she was saying, then neither could the kids.

A SMART-ALEC kid is one thing, but we get lip in triplicate. At the age of three and a half they're not just talking, now they're talking like ... us.
    Donna stomps into the kids' room and puts her hands on her hips, real bossy. I smile, because I know who she reminds me of. "Now listen to me, childrens," she bellows, "I want you to clean up this mess right now, or else."
    "Later," Odelia answers dully. I wince, because I know who she reminds me of.
    Donna is now shrieking squeakily: "I'm talking to you!"
    "Don't you dare talk to me like that!" Odelia strikes back.
    "Oh yeah?"
    Now, Nomi butts in. "Listen to me, little sisters, I would like to say a question: third of all, stop shouting, first of all, where's Mummy, and second of all, kiss and make up."
    Odelia flails around on the floor in a bratty tantrum. "I'm trying to think and you're 'sturbing me!" She can't have learned that from her father.
    "If you don't like it, go live somewhere else."
    Alright, I admit to having been the inspiration for some of that, but not for the kicking, hair-pulling, biting and wrestling that follows.

WHATEVER THE shortcomings, the purpose of language has been fulfilled: my children can communicate. Now, if one of them cries, I can gather her in my arms and say: "What's the matter, sweetheart?" And she can now make herself understood: "I'm crying because I don't love you anymore, Daddy, that's why."
    Where it will all lead to, I think I can guess...
    "Would everybody please shut up, I'm on the phone."
    "Can I have the car tonight?"
    "Dad, maybe it's time you and Mom went to an ulpan. I'll pay."
    And inevitably: "What was my first word?"

THE LAST word on the matter comes from Donna, the most pedantic of the three. They were watching some buffoon on TV, and Donna wasn't laughing. When it finished, she turned to me and said: "He don't talks real good, do he?"