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Circumlocution

One of the problems with learning a language is that your vocabulary is often not adequate to express your thoughts. In addition, often the connotations of the word you use are not appropriate, even though the word may be technically correct. One of the things I admire about Amanda is that she never lets vocabulary get in the way of what she is trying to say. Language is flexible enough that I can almost always understand what she is trying to communicate, even if she uses the wrong word.

Today she wanted dessert after eating a good breakfast. She told me that she wanted a black round cookie. We have "Newman o's" that are like oreos, so it was pretty clear what she wanted (and equally clear that she would not get it, although that is another post). She then told me that if you lift up the circle cover, there was slime inside the cookie. "I love the slime. mmmm." Perhaps I should talk to the company about a new marketing campaign for slime filled cookies.

Yesterday she complained that Luke had gotten "nose water" on her chair. I like that euphemism---clear, but not as explicit.

My overall favorite Amanda/language story happened about a year ago, so I'm not sure whether I've posted it yet or not. Ah, well, you can hear it again. We were driving home past the airport, and the runway is perpendicular to the highway so planes go over all the time, pretty close to the ground. We like to point the airplanes out to the kids (or they point them out to us). We pointed to a large airplane to Amanda and said "Look Amanda! There's an airplane!" She answered, "That's not an airplane! That's a skateboard in the sky!" Both Michael and I said,"What!?!" "I was just joking."

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