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25 September 2007
What Was Your First Word?→[More:]Mine was "don't". I'm guessing it was something I heard a lot.
Mine was "milk." Of course, I don't drink milk anymore and haven't since...high school or so, maybe earlier. (I just don't like the taste of it at all.)
I asked my mom that question: She said, "Frankly, I don't remember. Does that make me a bad mother? OK...'dada'...from here on out your first word was 'dada'. Your brother can have 'no!'"
Light. Apparently I spent a week or two pointing at every light in the house and saying "Light! Light!" Then I got bored of it and say anything else for like a month.
I dont' know what my first word was, but I can remember the first word that I wrote. I was in pre-school, and fingerpainting, and I wrote "away" and then asked my teacher whether that was a real word. I remember she wouldn't let me clean it up until my mother came to pick me up, so she could show her.
I don't know what mine was but my son's was A Dog. We were at the zoo - there used to be an African Village at the Baltimore zoo with a herd of black goats and you could reach through the fence and pet them. He was 10 months old and was so excited by the zoo that day; by the time we got to the goats he was practically leaping out of the stroller. He grabbed a goat and just shouted, "A Dog! A dog! A dog, a dog, a dog!" Then he kept it up all the way back to the entrance - every animal was A Dog! It was great. My daughter, OTOH, pretty much started right in with the sentences, stuff like "Go, daddy! Want cookie!" and so on at about 8 months and has not, as they say, shut up since.
My mom and I lived with my grandparents at the time; both Grammy and Grandpa wore glasses and NEVER knew where they were. It wasn't that big of a house, and I was there pretty much all the time, so I always knew where to find them. I was constantly on the prowl at their house, actually, looking for Grammy's Jean Naté bath products from CVS hidden in the towel closet, or peeling their very sticky vinyl placemats off the glass-topped table, or exploring the basement and pretending that I was playing a song played by the keyboard's demo mode.
I also apparently taught myself to read from a combination of the newspaper, Wheel of Fortune and the phone book, and by the age of 3 or so I was shocking relatives by reading previously-unseen greeting cards with hard words like "through" inside.
I teach English now, so I guess I knew I had to get started early.
As a baby I was frightened of reflected light on the ceiling or wall, particularly if it moved, like, say, from a cup of coffee sitting in the morning sunlight or from the lid of my dad's Sail pipe tobacco can. Before I would crawl or toddle into any room of the house, I would first crane my neck and scan the ceiling for flickers. Naturally, my first word was a tremulous "light," accompanied by a wail, tears, and a headlong scamper to the safety of a stairwell.
Eideteker: same here. According to family lore, they had been quite worried since my brother had started speaking a lot younger, and it had been impossible to make him shut up ever since. But when my brother went to the hospital for a couple of weeks for a surgery, I suddenly started to speak. It turned out that I simply hadn't been given a chance to talk ;) My first words had been something like "I don't want to".
Mine was "hot."
Apparently I was fascinated by the gas stove from an early age. (the first time I stood up was by pulling myself on it, to which my mom grabbed me and screamed "NO KELLY! HOT!!!"
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
