Guardian article - When kids mangle their language we all learn.

When kids mangle language we all benefit

Clangernackys, needs and poodles, strangled eggs – young children don’t just invent language, they spruce it up as they learn to talk

‘When children get words skew-whiff, our language remains vibrant’ … Nicola Skinner with her daughter, Polly. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt for the Guardian

Nicola Skinner

Saturday 9 January 2016 06.30 GMT Last modified on Saturday 9 January 2016 10.00 GMT

Helping a tiny baby to learn your language is like building a bonfire with words for twigs. Nothing happens for ages. You keep putting the bloody twigs on and trudging back and forth in a cold, damp field. You may have a faulty pelvic floor and much rather be watching something on the telly with a towel under your bum, but bonfires don’t build themselves, do they?

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But there’s a problem. No matter how many words you pile on, nothing catches. At first, you try to build it properly, sentence by sentence, with full stops and proper pauses, but by the end, you’re just flinging random words on top of each other, sweating and slightly mad. You stand back. It’s taken more than a year or longer. You now have a huge pile of impressive but slightly useless wood. You try singing nursery rhymes to it, but it stares blankly back before doing a poo and crying.

You give up and are about to put the kettle on. Then you hear a roar and a crackle behind you. The fire has caught. Everything you piled on that bonfire, even the words you thought didn’t go in, is playing its part, burning brightly with the sheer exuberance of language. You stand back to bask in the heat and the magic and the wildness of the flames, rubbing your hands and telling all your neighbours: “Yep, I built that. Oh, it was nothing. Just love and patience, really.”

From that moment, the fire burns for ever.

Oh yes, it’s magical when your child starts to speak. Words such as “tree” and “dog” take on a portentous significance. The first time my daughter said “hat”, I glowed with pride for a whole week and texted everyone I knew. And then, to my delight, I learned that there’s something even better than children speaking new words for the first time.

It’s when they get them wrong.

Because when children try out words and hit them just a tiny bit off centre, they create a new language. A whole new world where the only rule is that there are no rules. Over the past few years, my daughter has built a universe populated with some very interesting creatures and it’s a place I love to visit. It’s where ashunks cavort, blithely unconcerned about their dowdy cousins, the elephants; where we need our wellies for dribbly days; where Farmer Christmas and his trusty Roodog prepare for Christmas in a tractor. Where we sit on a vench, which is so much more unfathomable and exotic than a bench, and we never cry, we just wail “Water eye!” Honestly, watching Polly give her own spin to her mother tongue has given her dad and me endless hours of fun. One day, I’ll give her a dictionary and ask her to read me every single page.

Some words, sadly, have to die. Children can be refreshingly unsentimental – when they tire of something, that’s it. Let’s not keep in touch. A year ago, I was chatting happily about ashunks. “It’s actually an elephant, Mummy,” my daughter explained patiently. Mentally, I bid the much-loved ashunk goodbye. “Thanks for the memories, buddy,” I whispered, watching her grey hulk trudge slowly away to that great big ashunk yard for discarded words up in the sky.

But for every word that doesn’t make it, I’m pleased to say there are thousands that last. As I discovered when, in the name of fearless investigative journalism, I went on Facebook and asked: “Do your children say any funny words?”

I was expecting only a few replies, but over the next two days I received nearly 500 comments and a wave of goodwill and nostalgia from complete strangers. Parents of toddlers and grownup children alike eagerly shared their family words and the ones that have lasted for decades.

They wrote about clangernackys (dressing-gowns), armboobs (elbows), and a moon dash (moustache). I learned about the fourth head (forehead), a hockle bockle (hot water bottle) and the child who says, quite beautifully, “I beg your garden”. There were conga mingas (concrete mixers), Truly Jumpers (Truly Scrumptious) and the mysterious “stagga blaggas” – there was no explanation attached, but why would you want one? We also discussed mum’s gutters (cow udders), booby whackers (bras), umbadinghys (umbrellas) and the gloriously titled “George Carrick Way” (dual carriageway). We discovered the linguistic wonderland that are eggs (or chuckleberries) from oglettes to strangled eggs and the artistically titled “clouds on bread that aren’t cooked”. One family revealed their perfect word for when your boiled egg has been cooked too long and can’t be dipped into. Dipappointing, of course.

Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock, who, “with eyes of flame, / Came wiffling through the tulgey wood, / And burbled as it came!” Photograph: Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy

Pins and needles were also ripe for interpretation, becoming fizzy feet, peas and noodles, or my favourite, needs and poodles. Imagine having needs and poodles in your legs! Life would never be dull again.

I learned that children are visionary. They are radically, authentically, brilliantly rebellious. Every time they give a new word a go, they create an alternative language as far-removed from the sterile, lifeless vocabulary of the boardroom as you can get. They make an entire new dialect that gets handed down, packed with family in-jokes, from generation to generation. They, not we, are the storytellers. Oh frabjous day, indeed.

We need to take our hats off to their bravery and gumption. When they learn new words, they are entering a grownup language, spoken by people taller and older than they are. Yet if they don’t know a word fully, they won’t be intimated – they give it a go. All their funny words aren’t just cute. They represent inestimable moments of bravery and imagination, of linguistic derring-do. It’s children swashbuckling their way through speech and saying: “It’s all right, I’ve got this.”

Who doesn’t occasionally think 'Jesus Price' when contemplating Christmas?

Did I say I love it when kids get words wrong? I’m not even sure they are getting them wrong. If anything, they get words a bit closer to the truth of things. The child who says, “I’m separate for the loo,” perfectly sums up a very particular sense of bodily alienation we can all identify with. The children who invented “Marks and Spensive” and “Oopsaglue” hit the nails on the head. The child who renamed traffic lights “greds” because they are green and red – I bow to his/her wisdom. As I do to the boy who, when asked what he was learning about one Christmas, replied “Jesus Price”. Who doesn’t occasionally think “Jesus Price” when contemplating Christmas? It’s as if they are playing hide-and-seek with language – peering past our accepted words to find the much better ones hiding behind them.

As long as we have children getting words a bit skew-whiff, our language will remain vibrant, elastic and full of life. Words are children’s verbal Play-Doh, and the more words get smashed, pounded, rolled around and get glitter, peas and sticks stuck to them, the better. The children of today are verbal iconoclasts in the best possible way. This is a language that breathes and laughs and falls over repeatedly. It doesn’t give a tinker’s fart for convention. Let them rewrite our language. Let them rewrite our world.

Poor old Gustave Flaubert once wrote that human speech was like a cracked kettle that tapped out rubbish songs for bears to dance to, “while we long to make music that will melt the stars”. If only he’d spent more time around children. Every day, they make a very melty type of music indeed, music that melts our hearts and cynicism and despair away. Music made up of bellypoppers, hairyplanes, Insect Days, bony-tails, sweaty eyes, school unicorns, suggestive biscuits, chicken pops and rabbit trees. Songs that celebrate the eternal appeal of pasta by renaming it sweaty bacanaise, bisgetti boggynaise and spaghetti car bananas. Music that stops us in our busyness to make us kiss our children, laugh, and feel joyful. So play on, stagga blaggas, play on.