I have just spent a week with a young woman bulking up on language. She is 2½ years old and calls me grandpa. A year ago she made noises. Now those noises are being transmuted into distinguishable words. It is dawning on her that the surrounding big people have given everything in her world a name. At this stage in her language development the words are mainly the names of objects. Book. Cat. Applesauce. Water. With each new word she improves her grip on the world. Increasing hand skills allow her to manipulate things. Increasing leg skills allow her to move more freely among things. And now she is discovering a box of tools called words which give her even more leverage over her expanding environs.
I used the phrase “bulking up” in the first sentence. Bulking up is what athletes call gaining muscle mass, i. e., getting stronger. Words are muscles. They are a form of private strength in a public world. We are born into a language system composed of words and their syntactical structures. Like feet and hands, words give us more control over our lives.
Words are our chief form of communication, transferring a unit of information from one mind to another. Words are like box cars carrying a cargo of ideas on a thought-train between two terminals. The sentence “Please pass the pepper” is a desire transference system that more often than not produces the requested result. My young language learner is discovering this use of language.
But there is another function of language that will take years for her to discover. In this second case, language’s purpose is to uncover, discover, articulate a fresh experience of the world. Words call our attention to something heretofore overlooked. This is the work of poetry: revealing a new revelation. A poem is a carefully and subtly crafted shout: “Hey, look at this.” The poet notices. The poet wants others to notice the nuanced expansion of experience.
For the toddler everything is new. New to her. She learns little that has not already been put into words. So, although she enjoys the sound of rhymes, she has not been struck by the force of poetic language. She has not been startled by a metaphor. Not yet. That day will come.
In the meantime, we who are her adult world can live alert for new constructions of meaning, new nuances of mood and tone, new images that sharpen our focus on life. Then in future years, she will notice the world that she received as a given is continuing to grow with her. Thanks to us, her understanding will deepen, her senses will heighten, her experience will become richer, and her life will more radiant. And best of all, she will add her own voice to the poem of the world.
2016