Sameness
It started two or three weeks ago when I took Gabriel out for a walk around the neighborhood and he pointed out every green city garbage can he saw. Though he has a small vocabulary, at twenty months G is still not a talker; when he notices something, he points and asks “Eh?”1 Because he also requires that everything he sees be acknowledged, if you had watched us walk that day (or any day since), this is what you would have seen:
G, walking happily down the sidewalk, stops in front of a driveway, points, and asks, “Eh?”
“It’s a garbage can,” I say. “It’s green.”
G moves on a few steps to the next driveway. He looks up toward the garage. He points, and asks “Eh?”
“It’s a garbage can,” I say. “It’s green.”
And so forth it goes until G tires of walking and I carry him. This doesn’t stop him from pointing out the cans, of course; because I walk faster, it allows him to point out cans faster. Sometimes he notices the garbage cans across the street; he’s ecstatic if it’s trash day and all the cans are out on on the curb.
It took a couple of rounds of this before I realized that G wasn’t so much pointing out garbage cans as he was pointing out the sameness they represented. In his toddler way, he was saying that this can is like that one, which is like the two cans behind our house, which is like every other can, too. It’s a bit of a shame that garbage cans were the initial (and continuing) object of this cognitive development, but I suppose there’s no way to control exactly what a toddler will fixate on.
Since G began pointing out the garbage cans, he has also begun to point out illustrations of trees in his books.2 At the same time, he has begun to point out the fact that pictures of things in books are things in the world. The bookshelf in Goodnight Moon is like the bookshelf in his room; the pussy cat who visits the queen, though in the illustration looks nothing like our cats, is nevertheless a cat, and so he points out Bingley or Jane when we read that page.
So, slowly but surely, G continues to learn the ways of language, how representations of things (words, images) refer, generally and specifically, to things.
1 In contrast, when our five-year-old friend A—— was his age (and perhaps younger), she would ask “That?” As much as I am loathe to admit it, G is example, not an exception, to the anecdotal rule we’ve heard that boys come to language later than girls.
2 Acknowledging every tree in Where the Wild Things Are as a tree makes Where the Wild Things Are go by very slowly.
