How children absorb language is interesting. Both JMan and Bookzilla are at the oath emitting stage: they both want to use oaths at moments of exasperation, but they don’t know any and are casting about for some that are socially acceptable but still edgy enough to capture the frustration.
JMan says “Gosh!” when a car crashes during a Playstation racing game. In years that will come too soon, he will probably transition to exhortations of Divine intervention to perform things that are not anatomically possible, but that is in the future. Right now, his “Gosh!”, repeated in a way that no one else would repeat it, is okay to hear.
JMan comes to the table and talks about the game that he has been playing on the Playstation 3. I ask him a question. He responds by saying that he already told me about the feature and I wasn’t listening. I am about to pull rank on him when I realize that I have said those exact words to him. We are in “do as I say, not as I do” territory. I ask him if I have said that to him, and he denies it, sensing a social transgression. I say that I have used those words and they were true then and probably true for me. I undoubtedly applied some verbal context to get him to pay attention, and that tone of voice is what I heard and to which I objected. He tries to soften it by saying that I’m supposed to take care of him and he is not supposed to take care of me. I’m not comfortable with the double standard, but tell him that I will try to pay more attention to what he is saying in the future.
JMan sits across the table from me. He is looking at the box for the Playstation 3 he had just been playing. He eats his oatmeal without looking at it. He asks about the font used on the box. Seven years old and he talks about things in terms of font and font appearance. The ways that computers have changed the lives of children are not easily measured.
He asks about the Playstation 4. I try to explain that it is being planned now. I try to explain product life cycles and how each generation of system leads to the next. I tell him that the next platform will be coming out in about eight years. I do a little math and tell him that if I am still around when the Playstation 6 comes out, I will be 76 and he will be 31. He’ll probably be a parent. I tell him that I’ll give his kids Playstation 6s. He said:
“You go, Grandpa!”