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.