The Occasional Brilliance of Babble

I teach second grade in a fine public school district here in the Twin Cities, and I’ve done so for almost 16 years now. I love the kids dearly, don’t get me wrong, but I have to admit that I sometimes get tired of “little kid talk,” and yearn to be teaching older students, to exercise my vocabulary, to talk to someone who gets my jokes. And then there are those times when I encounter the brilliance of the 7- and 8-year-old mind that is as yet unfettered by social anxiety and the fear of “being wrong.” A mind that is still experimenting with language, and in which the imagination has not yet been squashed in favor of factual knowledge, curriculum, and testing strategies. My favorite all-time tale of “accidental linguistic brilliance” comes from my good friend Sally, who taught primary grades for many years in Minneapolis.

Sally was collecting papers from her first graders one day (I believe it was a permission form, of sorts), and she noticed that one student had not yet turned hers in. She called the student over to her desk to ask the girl where her permission form was. The girl slapped her palm to her forehead in dismay and groaned, “I for-keep-on-getting!”

  

Now, at first glance it might be easy to write this off with a “How cute! She mixed up her word order!” But I challenge you to look more closely to see what she really did. By splitting the word “forgetting” and placing the phrase “keep on” between the two parts, this youngster created what linguists call an infix (akin to a prefix or suffix, but appearing within a word instead of at either end). And English doesn’t really have infixes.* Or not, I should say, until now.

Look again. Not only did she insert “keep on” into the word “forgetting,” but she split the latter at exactly the right spot, between two morphemes, linguistically speaking. She might have said “I keep forgetting on,” or “I forget keep on-ing” or something like that, but she didn’t. She distinguished two recognizable parts of the verb: “for” and “get.”

It gets better. It turns out that the precise affix she chose (“keep on”) is one that is common to several other languages as either an infix or suffix, and has probably been in use, in one form or another, since human language began. It’s called a frequentative, and it is affixed to a verb to indicate repeated action (in other words, action that the doer “keeps on” doing.) The example I’m most familiar with is ancient Greek, which used the infix σκ (sk) with the imperfect tense to indicate repeated action in the past (e.g., “I used to study Greek and Latin”). Russian, Finnish, Turkish and Hungarian also use an affix (usually a suffix) to show repeated action. English has its own version of this, shown in words like “blabber,” “sparkle” and “chatter,” (from “blab,” “spark” and “chat”), but the sense of repeated action hasn’t really survived. (I would have loved to find out whether this girl had any ancestors who spoke a Slavic or Finno-Ugrik language, just to test the notion of cultural memory. I’m mostly kidding, but it is intriguing.)

Her creation (invention, what have you) has stuck with me, and over time I have begun to think of it as something more than accidental. After all, think of what this girl did with that “simple” rewording: not only did she create an infix by herself – one that was useful for her and, at the same time, could be immediately understood by her audience (no small feat!). And not only did she choose the “best” placement for this infix, but she also invented the English version of a useful form that already exists in other languages. It may not have much use outside of this one instance (“I re-keep-on-peating myself” just doesn’t have the same oomph), but that doesn’t detract from its brilliance. It is useful, and I have shared it with my students (who get it immediately). I also admit that I myself have uttered “I for-keep-on-getting!” in certain situations (with the requisite forehead slap) -- mostly with adults who know me well enough not to run away. Immediately.

So I guess what I’m saying is this: listen to children, especially when they are experimenting with language. You might hear something really cool. To quote a “Deep Thought” from Jack Handy, "The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.”

[*Actually, linguists would probably call this tmesis, like the ever-popular “fan-f***ing-tastic.” However, I would argue that it is as close to a true infix, in form, placement, and meaning, as you can get in English. So...nyah.]