Saturday, December 24, 2005

Mind your language!

It is fun to watch how language develops in children, and the way that they make language work for them according to their own rules, prior to finding out what the actual rules are.

One of our favourite phrases from our eldest child was the whole phrase "look after" being used as a verb - as in: "Who's lookaftering us this evening? Jo lookaftered them after school."

Our youngest child today came up with a similar odd use of "left over" - "How much of the cream had you leftovered?" - i.e. "to leftover" is a verb, meaning to leave some over.