We hear a lot of famous last words, but rarely are the first words of the great and good recorded.
Most of us ordinary mortals, presumably, start off with mama or dada but I’ve heard of a few who didn’t.
The first words of our god-daughter Harriet, for example, were “Lewes, this is Lewes”. Her mum lived in the town of Lewes and, every morning, she’d put Harriet out in her pram in the back garden which was close to the railway station. So the first words Harriet heard every day were the station master’s tannoy announcements, “Lewes. This is Lewes.”
And then there was little David Scott, the son of former school teacher of mine. David’s first words were, “Baby seal lifer’s pogrom”. His mum used to get up very early and switch on the radio before broadcasting had started (who else remembers those days?). Then she’d set about making the breakfast and, after a while, transmission would begin. So the first thing David heard every morning was the announcer saying, “This is the BBC Light Programme…”
And how about Cathy Robertson, the daughter of a very literate and talkative Edinburgh family? She took so long before saying anything at all that Ma and Pa Robertson were worried that she might never speak at all. Suddenly, at the breakfast table one morning, Cathy said, “Pass me the sugar, please.” She had been, they later concluded, perfectly capable of speech for many months. But, with a family of four to look after everything she required, she just didn’t use it until she finally had to.
OK, so none of those people are famous, but you get the point. I was discussing this once with a friend who said he’d heard that the first words uttered by Oedipus were, “I’ll be back.” So there’s one in the eye for Arnie.
So famous first words anybody?
6 Responses to FAMOUS FIRST WORDS
Cute. I don’t know the first single word of either of my nieces,so the following don’t count as first words, but the older niece’s first two fully formed sentences, at the age of 2, were both uttered in cars. (My brother test drives fast cars as part of his journalism job.) They were: ‘Daddy drives fast, Mummy drives slowly’, and ‘This car could do with a good clean’.
“This car could do with a good clean” is a wonderful first sentence. One wonders if the child grew up with an obsession about car cleanliness. let’s hope not.
One thing I find miraculous about children is their ability to form sentences and use grammar in logical (if not always correct) ways. I kind of understand how they pick up words and the meanings associated with them but to then string those words into a coherent sentence, that’s smart, and they do it very young.
Puts me in mind of that chimp (or was it a gorilla?) that learned to make sign language to indicate, for example, that it wanted a drink. I wonder if it progressed beyond that? Is it now sitting in a bar in some dense African jungle re-formulating Einstein’s Theory of Relativity from an ape perspective? Or is it just getting drunk and gawping at the tv shouting, ‘Bloody, hell, ref, that was never offisde,” like most of the intelligent life forms on the planet?
I agree about how amazing the inherent ability to form a sentence with clauses is. The first sentence the same niece spoke to me was when she was 2 or 3. She came from her bedroom into the living room where I was, carrying a pile of Miffy books I’d given her on my last visit, and said ‘here are the books you gave me, which I love.’ My brother said it was the first time she had strung together a vaguely complex sentence. I suppose they just listen and imitate.
The animal experiments are interesting but I reckon they couldn’t be repeated nowadays because they’d be deemed unethical (rightly, in my view). I think some of the monkeys given intensive time with humans from birth on to try and teach them human language end up thinking they’re human by imprinting. (In zoos, when feeding orphaned baby animals, the zoo keepers often have to disguise the feeding hand as that animal species to stop the baby from believing it’s a human, and there was an enormous bird (heron?) in Scotland last year which had been found as a hatchling and had to be taught to fly when it reached adulthood – there was comical footage of its human ‘daddy’ running along the road flapping his arms, and the large bird staggered alongside, flapping its wings, and eventually became airbourne!)
I remember there was an experiment in the ’60s where a baby chimp was brought up in a family of humans to try and teach it human language and skills – I seem to remember reading there were tragic consequences. And there were those other experiments in the same era where they took away a baby chimp’s mother and gave it the choice of a couple of inanimate substitutes – those pictures of the baby chimp shivering as it tried to cuddle the furry hot water bottle still make me shudder.
I read somewhere that if you intensively train certain breeds of animals, they can show similar intelligence levels to that found in kids of about 3 or 4 years old. I suppose the trouble with teaching chimps language is they would never be able to reason like an intelligent adult human, just parrot words they’d heard, or say things that they knew, in a Pavolv’s dogs way, would lead to a certain response.
I do like the image of a row of chimps yelling at the TV during a football match, though. I’d probably get more of a decent explanation of the offside rule from them than from my boyfriend
From what I’m told by my eldest sister, apart from the standard coo-ing, and “mama/dada” stuff, my first sentence was aimed at TV appearance by Twiggy in the mid-sixties when I pointed at the screen and said: “Ooooh pretty.” So telling…
First thing my eldest daughter Lydia said was “shoos”, i.e. “shoes”.
It always makes me smile the way even very young kids often make gender-appropriate comments,even if boys and girls are brought up with no stereotyping. Maybe Lydia will grow up to own a shoe collection to rival Imelda Marcos’s
. And Joe was perhaps displaying his good taste in women at an early age.
My youngest niece is endearingly girlie in her comments. The first sentence she spoke to me was ‘your hair is curly’. Halfway through the same visit, she toddled off and put on a pair of pink leggings under her party dress. And of all the presents I’ve given her, she adored a pink-cased Hello Kitty DVD the most.