“Language is the dress of thought.”
~Samuel Johnson
Max has never been willing to miss out on the swirling world that fills his eyes. This was never more evident than when he was a two year old toddler, teetering at the lip of fully developed speech. His sister, two years his senior and never without a mouthful of verbiage, would spit sentences with supersonic speed as Max just sat for seconds at at time, eyes wide and mouth open, like a sixteen year old gathering the courage to merge onto the freeway.
And thus, “bahma” was born. The language of children is fascinating.
Anyone my age, give or take a calendar or two, surely remembers the Smurfs. Probably with affection. Though it was fun to watch those little azure mushroom dwellers constantly dodging the danger of Gargamel, it was far more interesting (for me at least) to see the games they played with language.
The word “smurf” – never before had I seen a single syllable twisted in so many directions. Noun, verb, adjective; homophone, synonym, onomatopoeia. The Smurfs was a show that had a horde of tiny blue men in white pants (alongside one lonely blond created by their arch nemesis) who lived inside magic mushrooms and spent their days gathering smurf berries. Oh, and if you caught seven of them (if memory serves) you could boil them into a bubbling pot of gold.
Weird, sure, but not nearly as cool as the fact that on the Smurfs, this was perfectly acceptable: “Hey Smurfette, would you be a smurf, and fetch me a smurf so I can smurf. I’m feeling smurfed and If I get a smurf, I might be able to smurf a little smurf.” To add a multiple on top of the crazy, the second smurf would casually answer with, “smurf thing, I’ll smurf the smurf in a smurf.”
WHAT?!?
Two and a half decades later, I’m still trying to decide if those writers were the laziest batch of thinkers to ever fritter 22 minutes or whether they held genius unparalleled. My sister and I used to whittle minutes trying to convince one another we had the language totally figured out.
Max would have loved the Smurfs. He used bahma in exactly the same way. This was in the days just before our preschool got started. Daisy and I were tutoring a large passel of fifth graders in our house after school each day, plus he lived in a house with both Mia and myself (both of us who know quiet only as concept), but there was nothing that was going to slow this kid down.
Max was determined, and viewed the constant rattle of language as an open invitation. We had thousands of cards in our deck and Max but a scant few hundred, yet amazingly, our boy treated this handicap as only a hiccup.
“Daddy,” he would ask as a smile made an oval of his round face, “Why is that bahma always sitting next to the bahma?” Max was able to measure tone against environment to eliminate any question of intention, allowing me to answer without so much as a skipped beat.
“Because Daddy forgot to throw it away,” I would have to admit.
Bahma became a catch-all word, even capable of modifying others. I’ll never forget the day we sat outside as Max gazed into the sky at the whirring blades of a news chopper. “HELLA-DA-BOMBA” he breathed, pointing in wonder.
Leaves fell, bahmas receded, and by Christmas dinner they had been all but abandoned to memory. Still, rarely does a week pass without my mind wandering back to bahma, causing a smile to lengthen my own face.
Bahma!, I think with a mind suddenly thick with melancholic laughter.
Writer Dad
Special thanks to David Wright whose post yesterday about the language of his toddler was all the prompt I needed today.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
