My sister had some friends who thought that the mispronunciations of their child were cute and adopted them into the language of their family. The kid had to go to speech therapy for several months to learn to talk once he began school. I have never been inclined to use baby talk anyway. But, that definitely inspired me to talk to my child as I wished them to speak.

That said, sometimes the way my child learned language often amused me.

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We used to love to get the large Entenmann’s Danish pastry to keep around for breakfast or snacks. One morning, I asked C what they wanted for breakfast. “Breakfast.” “Well, yeah. But, what? Cheesey eggs? Grits?” “I want Breakfast.” and pointed to the box. Apparently, I had offered for breakfast often enough that C thought that was the word for it. And we did call it that from then on.

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I was never sure how the confusion about the difference between cookies and crackers happened. But, I do recall how mad they got when they asked me for a cracker and got exactly that. They wanted a cookie and it took us a minute to work out where the confusion lay. It only took one explanation of “If you want the sweet one say ‘cookie’ and if you want the not-sweet one say ‘cracker’.” for them to always be accurate after that.

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When they were learning to read, they came home from school and told me their teacher didn’t know how to spell juice. “She thinks it’s spelled JUICE.” I asked how they thought it was spelled.  “DJOOS”  I said “Actually, she’s correct.  But, I can see why you thought it was the other way. It does have kind of weird spelling.” C said, “Well, dang. I’ve been pronouncing it wrong all along.”

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It’s been fun discussing language with this person for 30 years.