Sarah E. H. Lyons

Few things have sparked such delight in me as watching my child wrestle with English. When he was two, he communicated in grunts and words that, phonetically, had no rhyme or reason. Fortunately, for us (the grander we), children possess a cleverness both awestriking and terrifying. His grunting changed to words (e.g., whoosha for pouch), then to sentences (his first being “The shark eats the bubbles”). He figured out how to make an R sound, an L sound by visually observing how my mouth wrangled words. Then his simple present phrases moved to past tense by adding -ed, creating lovely gaffes like bringed, and then he stopped using his name to refer to himself, adopting I, as if he discovered his agency.

And this is what language acquisition is: discovery. I never considered language in this construct until I took SPAN426, 1492 and the Aftermath, during my undergrad. The course, taught in Spanish, concerned the conquistadores and colonialism, and part of the course addressed language to describe an alien world. Explorers had the novelty of experiencing new tastes, sights, sounds, scents, and textures with the additional challenge of conveying these senses to their patrons, leveraging a medium both parties understood. How do I make the foreign accessible? How do I describe a grapefruit to someone who has never experienced citrus? Some would say it’s ineffable—but is it really? Writers understand the problems plaguing this approach. It signals poor craft; it violates the writer–reader contract (unwritten but extant as decorum is). Instead, we search for the connection, grasp the human element—the connective tissue. And we do this with language, which—using our words—allows us to create a bridge. 

Our children understand this when they attempt to explain things for which they lack a vocabulary. My child, upon experiencing spicy foods, said the food bit his tongue. He called sparkling water “spicy.” Eventually, he learned that dog applied to other four-legged fluffy friends aside from our pet. And we’ve seen similar approaches with people renaming animals. Snakes become “danger noodles”; penguins, “business geese.” Cassowaries could be aptly named “murder turkeys” too. 

When I studied in Mexico, my housemother did the same—grasping whatever words she could to make sense. She had taught herself English (I applauded her for that), and she described everything she found wonderful as “day-lee-shus”—and I adored this because it was organic and expressed a specific yet defamiliarized sentiment. And whether from my unconscious use of this phrase or an instance of multiple discovery, my child uses “delicious” as an adjective with applications beyond taste, reminiscent of my experiences ages ago.

We use the words we possess to create shared meaning, which makes language a crucial social behavior; it conveys to others something of ourselves, something about the places we came from, the people we are. What words we use and how we describe a situation speak volumes to our histories. There are certain terms we can place geographically, as Barbara Kingsolver demonstrates in Demon Copperhead, where her protagonist exists in Southwest Virginia, which has parallels to my rural Virginia upbringing. Patricia Bizzell describes pockets of shared language patterns as discourse communities, which guide how we interact in our social spaces and the subjects of those interactions.¹ Our language shapes who we are, how we interact, how we see the world.

I think about this often. My child has become a curator of my language, which he stows for later use, sometimes weaponizing my words against me with his steel-trap mind that seems immune to redirects or little white lies. It makes me wonder what kind of person he will become and what path his language will follow. I can trace my own history in words and identify moments when my language clashed with setting or betrayed some element of myself—never malignant; just surprising or odd, if anything. For instance, my thesis mentor brought to my attention a technical flavor that sometimes arises in my writing, which I know stems from years spent in fighter squadrons where beeps, squeaks, and radar scopes capture the visual field. But most importantly, these habits are not always so visible to ourselves but stand out to others. 

This recognition makes me more conscious of what I say or express, what artifacts I want my child to collect. He’s already collected colorful words from sitting backseat while my spouse shares his own grasp of English, rife with side-quest jargon, while stuck in rush-hour traffic.

From a parenting perspective, this is the delight and detriment of raising miniature versions of ourselves—and rather gutting when your child, trying to dodge bedtime, complains, “I don’t have time for this,” holding up a mirror. Our words have a greater impact than we believe. And that’s a beautiful, dangerous thing.

From a craft perspective, this consideration of terminology provides a new perspective on how we manipulate words. On the surface, this is how we can create unique voice for our characters, whether first person, third person, or dialogue—the terms matching the speaker and their unique viewpoints, which then the audience embodies as fiction cultivates empathy. Further, it urges we sidestep “ineffable” cop-outs of description. Even our children can describe what they have yet to understand. Like them, we can chart the unknown too. 

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1. See Bizzell, P. (1992). Academic discourse and critical consciousness. University of Pittsburgh Press.