From the Narrow Desert: Childhood

Showing posts with label Childhood. Show all posts

Saturday, October 28, 2023

How I imagined "cimeters" as a child

I had a healthy interest in weaponry as a child, and I certainly knew what a scimitar was, but I didn't make the connection that the cimeters in the Book of Mormon were a variant spelling of the same thing. I figured it was an untranslated word, like curelom, and referred to some distinctive Lamanite weapon for which there was no English name. When I was about seven or eight, I was pretty sure that a curelom was a Triceratops and that a cimiter looked like this:

I was never very good at explaining this to people. "I think it was like a Frisbee with spikes on it, on the end of stick" -- and they would always imagine something like a mushroom!

I think this childhood image may have contributed to my later appreciation of the Man Who Knows How to Rick.

I think his ricking-stick probably has a spherical head, though, in which case it would not be a true cimeter. And if it does have a disk-shaped head, he's using it wrong. Obviously, you're not supposed to swing a cimiter like a tennis racket!

Friday, December 16, 2022

The bricklayer's son goes dit-da-doo

This is a song we used to sing in my school days, meaning 1985-89, in Derry, New Hampshire and/or Harford County, Maryland (I think it was in New Hampshire). It's sung more or less to the tune of "The Wheels on the Bugs Go Round and Round," and the lyrics are rather straightforward:

The bricklayer's son goes dit-da-doo
The bricklayer's son goes dit-da-doo
The bricklayer's son goes dit-da-doo
The bricklayer's son goes dit-da-doo

Occasionally additional verses were added in which the bricklayer's son "went" various other nonsense syllables such as "raw-de-raw," but usually it was just "dit-da-doo." There was also a variant that replaced the fourth line with "All day tomorrow," but that was considered uncool and was only sung by girls.

The thing is, it seems as if the song must have been around for a while, since referring to anyone as "the bricklayer's son" isn't the sort of thing that would come naturally to American children in the late eighties, but I can find no reference to it anywhere on the Internet. So I'm remedying that by posting it here, in the vague hope that years down the line someone else will google the line, end up here, and leave a comment saying, "You remember that, too? I thought I was the only one!"

Thursday, July 14, 2022

Owl! Owl! Owl! Owl! Owl!

This is one of my very early memories. We were living in Derry, New Hampshire; my younger sister was old enough to talk, and the third child either hadn't been born yet or couldn't talk, so it must have been late 1981 or early 1982. The family was in the car -- a burnt-orange Toyota Tercel -- with my father driving and my sister and me in the back.

Suddenly my sister and I both started shouting "Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!"

My mother turned around in the passenger seat. "Are you two okay?"

"Yes, we're fine."

Then we started again: "Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!"

My father, understandably annoyed, said, "Stop shouting 'Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!'"

"But we're calling our ow!" I said. I couldn't pronounce owl properly.

I haven't the slightest idea why we decided to "call our ow" at that particular time in that particular way, but the memory has always stuck with me.

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Decades later, I read Molière's Le Médecin malgré lui in an English translation. Sganarelle beats Martine, and Martine shouts, "Ow! Ow! Ow!" Then he beats Géronte, and Géronte shouts, "Ow! Ow! Ow!" Finally, Valère and Lucas beat Sganarelle, and he -- you'll never guess what he does -- yes, he, too, shouts, "Ow! Ow! Ow!" To this day, if you mention Molière to me, the first thing that comes to mind is "Ow! Ow! Ow!" and then I think of my sister and me "calling our ow" in the back seat of the burnt-orange Tercel.

Imagine, at the age of two or three I was speaking prose without realizing it!

⁂

As I've mentioned before, I've been reading Mike Clelland's book about owls and aliens. Today it occurred to me to search The Higherside Chats archives for his name, since basically anyone who has written anything weird enough has been on that show. Sure enough, he has been. In his interview with Greg Carlwood, he tells this story:

This woman, she's a young woman at the time, she's in her forties now, at the time she was 19 years old, and she was working at a summer camp for girls. So she is walking between two parts of the camp, so she's on a path, and she can hear girls in the background, and she's just walking along, and she comes around a corner, full daylight, full sunshine, bright meadow, she's on this little path. Standing next to the path is a gray alien, like full daylight. And she had only at that point, she had recognized that she had had these contact experiences and felt that they were related to aliens, but here it was full daylight, and up until then every experience she'd ever had had happened at night, so she just like is shocked, and she's so shocked that she doesn't stop walking. Her feet are on like autopilot, just walk walk walk walk.
So she sees this alien, the alien sees her, and then there's this telepathy that takes place, one hundred percent of the accounts, and so she has this telepathic kind of like reverberation, this echo chamber, and she hears this being go, "Owl! Owl! Owl! Owl! Owl!" and she watches -- boom! -- it morph into a four-foot-tall owl. This four-foot-tall gray being with a bald head and the big black eyes, skinny body, suddenly turns into a four-foot-tall owl. And then she watches this owl turn around and run awkwardly into the woods.

Friday, June 11, 2021

The strange plan to capture the muscae volitantes

Like most people, I have muscae volitantes ("floaters") in my vitreous humor, and I have been aware of them from a very early age. Noticing floaters is apparently rare enough that there is a medical term for it: myodesopsia; for the non-noticers among my readers, they look like little transparent wormy things that float around in the visual field and are generally invisible unless you deliberately pay attention to them.

When I was very young -- approximately three years old, I think -- I somehow got it into my head that I could catch these little invisible critters and make them less invisible. (I thought of them as something "out there" in the world, but which only I could see, and had no name for them.) I had a very clear image in my head of what equipment I would need to do this:

This is a piece of brown corrugated cardboard, to be cut from a box. The rainbow stripes were to be applied in crayon. As you can see, the whole left half was to be rainbow-striped, while on the right the colors would be applied only to this shape. The mental image of this was extremely clear, like a photographic memory, although I never actually made it. It was an image of what I needed to make.

The most important component, though, was plastic wrap. Stretching a piece of plastic wrap over the crayoned cardboard would cause the floaters to become trapped under the plastic, and the rainbow colors would be transferred to them, so that they would no longer be transparent and nearly invisible but all rainbowy and clearly visible to all. I'm not sure what I was going to do with them once I had caught them -- Keep them trapped? Release them into the wild? -- but I could cross that bridge when I came to it.

First, though, I needed some plastic wrap. I needed that first, because if I colored a piece of cardboard and then asked my mom for some plastic wrap to cover it with, she would obviously not agree. So, before doing anything else, I went and asked her, "Mom, do we have any plastic?"

She asked what kind of plastic, and I said just plastic, and she explained that there were many different kinds, pointing out various objects in the house that were made of plastic. I finally made her understand the kind I wanted, and that is when the term plastic wrap first entered my vocabulary.

Then, of course, she asked what I wanted it for -- and I was at a loss to explain. I mean, communicating the concept of "plastic wrap" had been difficult enough. How was I supposed to explain the things that I wanted to catch and how I intended to catch them? So I said something unconvincing -- something along the lines of "I don't know" -- and failed to score the plastic wrap, and the whole plan fizzled out.

Friday, June 12, 2020

The time I mistook sun for the Andromeda Galaxy

Makes me think of Shakespeare's mistress’ eyes

This is one of my strangest memories.

I can' be sure exactly how old I was at the time, but I was very young. My family was living in Derry, New Hampshire, at that time, and I was out on the deck behind our house with my sister Crystal, who is one year younger than me. My mother was in the house taking care of the baby (my brother Luther, who is about three years younger than me), and there was no one else in the house. My youngest two siblings hadn't been born yet, so I can't have been older than four -- and probably closer to three, given that Luther was still "the baby."

Anyway, Crystal and I saw a large shining object hovering above us in the sky, and we stared at it for several minutes trying to figure out what it could possibly be. Finally, I went downstairs to the small bookcase in the living room where the field guides were kept, took out the Field Guide to the Night Sky (never mind that it was daytime), and thumbed through it until I found a picture that looked like the object we had seen. Then I found my mother and had her read the caption to me.

"It's -- uh -- the Andromeda Galaxy," she said. (I remember she stressed the first and third syllables, which I would much later learn was not the standard pronunciation.) "Why do you ask?"

"Crys and I saw it out on the deck."

This understandably roused my mother's curiosity and concern, and so she followed me back out onto the deck, where Crys was still looking up at the thing.

"My goodness! That's the sun! Stop looking at it, or you'll hurt your eyes!"

And so we went back into the house, and that was that.

⁂

The reader will have observed that the Andromeda Galaxy is, to coin a phrase, nothing like the sun, and that -- most heavenly bodies being spherical -- a Field Guide to the Night Sky would surely contain any number of pictures that look much more like the sun than the Andromeda Galaxy does.

In my memory, the thing we were looking at looked like -- the sun -- round and white, with nothing at all to suggest a barred spiral galaxy. The only unusual thing about it was that it was shining though clouds thick enough that its light was paled somewhat, making it possible to look at it directly, but thin enough that the solar disc was clearly visible. It was a white circle with clearly defined edges, looking a bit more like the moon than like the sun as it usually appears. But it never occurred to me, or my sister, to guess that it was the sun, or even the moon. Somehow, out of all the stars and planets and things in that field guide, I decided it was the Andromeda Galaxy that it most closely resembled.

Friday, November 8, 2019

Missile man

Writing about my childhood fascination with Methuselah dredged up this old memory.

When I was a very young child, I labored under the misapprehension that "this old man" -- you know, the fellow who had a knick-knack paddywhack with which he played knick-knack on, among other things, my thumb -- was actually called "missile man." (British readers will have to keep in mind that Americans pronounce missile as missal, so that it very nearly rhymes with this ol'.) Now I know what you're thinking: "'Missile man came rolling home?' That doesn't even make sense!" True enough, but what can I say? I was young.

I'm not sure how old I was when I got around to looking up "Methuselah" in a Bible dictionary, which informed me that the meaning of the name was "possibly 'man of the missile.'" This confused me on several levels -- partly because names from before the Tower of Babel ought to be etymologically opaque, and partly because, as far as I knew at the time, the word missile could refer only to a warhead-bearing rocket, which seemed just a bit out of place in the Old Testament. (It would still be many years before I was inducted into the mysteries of THAC0, saving throws, and the distinction between melee and missile weapons.) Anyway, I started thinking of the "missile man" in the song as being Methuselah.

Later, of course, I found out that it had been "this old man" all along -- which, by a strange coincidence, is also a singularly appropriate title for Methuselah!

Monday, April 29, 2019

The mystery of baschetti

Spellings vary . . .

I prefer the authentic Italian orthography.

Lots and lots of very young children mispronounce spaghetti by transposing the /s/ sound to the beginning of the second syllable. While Bil Keane renders this naively, by simply moving the letter s, giving us pasghetti, in fact every child I've known (including myself when I was very young), has pronounced it /bəˈskɛtɪ/ -- which in Italian spelling would be baschetti.

Why does the /p/ change into a /b/? Well, in fact it doesn't change at all -- but the rules of English phonetics mean that the same sound -- an unaspirated voiceless bilabial stop -- is heard as /p/ when it comes after /s/ but as /b/ when it begins a word. The so-called "voiced" (lenis) stops /b d g/ are actually voiceless in word-initial position, and are distinguishable from their "voiceless" (fortis) counterparts /p t k/ because the latter are aspirated. However, fortis stops lose their aspiration after /s/, so the distinction between the two is lost in that position. That's why disgust and discussed are homophones for most speakers, and why it's so easy to mishear Hendrix's "kiss the sky" as "kiss this guy." Sky is realized as [skaɪ], so when the /s/ is removed, it leaves guy [kaɪ] (not kie [kʰaɪ]). Thus, when the /s/ in spaghetti is moved, both the /p/ and the /g/ change their character, being heard as different phonemes in spite of not actually changing their sound. Hence baschetti.

*

The question is, why do children only do this with the word spaghetti? It's common for children to simplify consonant clusters by simply omitting one of the consonants (as in myyo for smile), but spaghetti is the only word I'm aware of in which the /s/ is not omitted but transposed to a different part of the word. We might expect, by analogy with baschetti, that some children would pronounce spider as byster, for example, but they don't, as far as I know. Byder, yes; byster, no. Nor have I ever heard of a deskosaurus.

My best guess is that it has to do with spaghetti being stressed on the second syllable, and that the /s/ is being moved from an unstressed syllable to a stressed one. I can't think of any other common words where the first syllable is unstressed and begins with /s/ + a fortis stop, and the second syllable is stressed and begins with a lenis stop, which could explain why baschetti is the only one I've ever heard. Few little kids are likely to have words like stability and twenty-three skidoo in their vocabulary, so the hypothesis that they might pronounce them as daspility and twenny-fwee gistoo never gets to be tested.

*

Update: Here are some stats on the relative frequency (measured in Google hits) of various spellings of this mispronunciation.

pasghetti (32,900)
pasgetti (21,700)
bisgetti (20,700)
pisgetti (17,800)
pasketti (16,400)
basghetti (14,000)
basketti (9,260)
bisghetti (8,660)
basgetti (6,690)
pisketti (4,240)

That's a total of 152,350 hits, which can be analyzed as follows.

61% begin with "p"; 39% begin with "b"
66% have "a" as the first vowel; 34% have "i"
44% have "g"; 36% have "gh"; 20% have "k"

The following spellings were not included in the analysis because most of the Google image search hits for them were not pictures of spaghetti. ("Pisghetti" arguably should have been included, since it mostly yielded pictures of a Curious George character called Chef Pisghetti, who is obviously named after the mispronounced pasta dish.)

baschetti (252,000)
bischetti (154,000)
pisghetti (19,300)
bisketti (17,800)
paschetti (15,600)
pischetti (2,790)

Friday, March 8, 2019

A dodo with pedals

From time to time I suddenly remember the dodo with pedals, a weirdly vivid memory dating back to a time from which few memories survive.

I can't be sure how old I was at the time, but I was living in New Hampshire and had not yet started kindergarten, so somewhere in the two-to-four range. My little sister and I were drawing pictures in crayon to send to "Auntie Lane" (whose proper name, I was later to find out, was actually Aunt Elaine).

"What should we draw next, Chris?"

"I don't know."

A sudden inspiration: "Let's draw a dodo with pedals!"

"Okay! That's a pretty good idea."

So I drew just that: a dodo bird with a pair of bicycle pedals instead of legs. Somehow I had gotten the idea that a dodo's beak pretty much looked like the mouth of a trumpet, flaring out and ending in a big circular opening. All my information about dodos came from a picture book based on Disney's Alice in Wonderland cartoon, and dodos were also connected in my mind with a picture I had seen of Donald Duck somehow puckering his beak to blow out a candle. (I always said "beak," never "bill," even referring to hadrosaurs as "duck-beaked dinosaurs.")

(Looking up the Disney dodo now, I see that, yes, the dark bit at the end of its beak could easily be mistaken for an opening. It also has a normal mouth underneath its apparent trumpet-mouth, but I'm pretty sure my drawing had a trumpet only, with no articulated jaw.)

Looking over at Chris's picture, I saw that she had completely misunderstood my idea and had drawn her dodo with petals. Girls!