Skip to main content

Nouns, Nouns, Everywhere

Some friends of mine have had recent blog posts on their children's language acquisition: Maria, Julian, Maya, and Theo. I think language acquisition is the most fun thing to observe in a young child's development.

I don't remember my own acquisition of language, but one of my favorite early memories is on the day that I learned about nouns. This happened one day during pre-school. I went to a Montessouri school, and the teacher (whom we called “Miss Irene”) took me aside to give me this special lesson. “A noun,” she taught me, “is a word that names a person, place, or thing.” She gave me several examples of nouns, and had me think up several of my own. I became quite enchanted with the concept, and went the rest of the day thinking up nouns. I would conjure an image of something in my head, such as a cat or a ball or my mother, and then use the “person, place, or thing” test to see if the thing I had thought of was a noun. Sure enough, every single thing that I thought of was a noun. I became convinced that every word was a noun.

When my father came to pick me up that day, I told him about the lesson I had learned. I told him that a noun is a person, place, or thing and gave him lots of examples. Then I shared with him my discovery that it seemed like everything was a noun. My mischievous father nodded sagely and replied, “Yes, I think you’re right. Every word is a noun. Except, maybe, for the word run.” I pondered this. Run wasn’t a person, wasn’t a place, and wasn’t a thing. Yes! My father had found the one word in the English language that wasn’t a noun! For quite some time, then, I went around thinking that all words in the English language were nouns except for run.

Comments

  1. J-J-J Michael, I really enjoy reading your blog. It makes me laugh.

    ReplyDelete
  2. But "run" can be a noun! Your world is not shattered, young Mr. Andresen...
    -liz

    ReplyDelete
  3. While "run" can be a noun, that concept was well beyond me at that point, even if I might have understood the sentence "I'm going for a run." (Sad!)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Conjunction Junction, what's your function?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can You Cross Your Toes?

Katie and I had a heated discussion the night before last. We were sitting on the couch watching Jon Stewart when she noticed a large, apparently cancerous growth sticking out of the bottom of my foot. She asked what the big lump in my sock was. "That's my toe," I responded, nonplussed. I had crossed my first and second toes, causing a lump to protrude from the bottom of my sock. Katie was quite alarmed. "You can cross your toes?" "Sure, can't you? Everyone can cross their toes!" "Of course I can't cross my toes. Who can cross their toes?" And I confirmed that Katie could not, in fact, cross her toes. Even manipulating her toes with my fingers, I could not get her toes to stay crossed. She just has very short toes. That led, of course, into a discussion of who was the freak. Were my long, crossable toes abnormal, or were her stubby, uncrossable phalanges the outliers? In case you're confused, here are some pictures. First, of my v

Leagalize drugs!

The Economist has a wonderful editorial this week about legalizing drugs. I wholeheartedly agree that the world will be better off by far if the United States legalized, taxed, and regulated illicit drugs such as cannabis, cocaine, and heroin. The goods that will come from legalization: 1. We will save the $40 billion the US spends trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. 2. We will save the costs involved in incarcerating so many drug offenders (as well as gain their productivity in society). 3. We will gain money through taxation on the legal drug trade. 4. Legalized drugs will be regulated, and thus purer and safer to take. 5. With all these savings, we will have lots of money to spend on treating drug addiction as a public health issue rather than as a law and order issue. We will have lots of money to fund treatment programs for addicts that are ensnared by the easier availability of drugs. 6. We will prevent tens of thousands of killings in countries that produce drugs when proc

2017 Prognostication Quiz FINAL POST: Questions 10 and 11, Stocks and Quakes

In the last post , I pointed out that Matthew D. and I were in a two-way tie at the top of the leaderboard with me holding the edge over him in the tiebreaker. For Matthew D. to have a chance to come from behind and grab the win, some significant December movement would be needed in one of three areas: the stock market, world earthquakes, or a convenient death. Here's what happened: 10. Stocks (December 29) How will stocks do in this first year of Trumponomics? Will the Dow Jones Industrial Average be up or down compared to the final close of 2016? Which way will the Dow go? a. Up b. Down The Dow Jones continued to rise throughout the month. I maintained my advantage in the tie-breaker. 11. Earthquake (December 31) How many big earthquakes (magnitude 8.0 or larger on the Richter scale) will there be this year? (Big earthquake counts from this millennium are indicated in parentheses.) How many big earthquakes will there be this year? a. None (2) b. One (7) c. Two (4) d. Th