Kids Say the Darndest Things

I take a lot of the things I say for granted and assume that the speech patterns and vocabulary I’m comfortable with make perfect sense to anyone within earshot of what I’m saying. While this is probably not a bad practice considering that 99% of the conversations I’ve had have been with native English speakers who, at least culturally speaking, have a lot in common with me, there have been times I’ve become aware of strange words and sentences leaving my mouth.

And I’m not really talking about colloquialisms here; things like, “He really rubbed me the wrong way,” and “We’re up the creek without a paddle” that make perfect sense to Americans but don’t really translate well to other languages (or even other regions or dialects). I wanted to share some things my students have said that made me think about the words I take for granted and those don’t really fall in the realm of the colloquial, but more with assigning a definition to a word that doesn’t really fit.

The first instance of this that’s stuck in my mind is actually from babysitting a couple of years ago. I was watching a movie with one of the kids and she was explaining the plot to me as we watched (just in case I couldn’t follow Disney cartoons). I forget the movie exactly, but all the animals in the area were going to get together and have a meeting. “The meeting,” she explained to me, “is called a caribou.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that a caribou is actually just a kind of animal that was at the big meeting, but from the movie I could tell how she came to assign that definition to the word ‘caribou’.

In one of my kindergarten classes the students were coloring on one of their worksheets and one of the girls asked me for a green crayon. I brought her a green crayon, what we might call like a dark green or hunter green, but she told me no, she wanted a SKY green crayon, which, as it turns out just means light green like sky blue = light blue. I’ve actually heard “sky green” thrown around a few times.

The last example of this is from one of my beginner classes. They’re not supposed to speak Korean in the classroom, so I was reminding them that they’re only allowed to speak English. One of the girls asked if they could then speak “Japan English” in the classroom and then rattled off a couple of Japanese phrases.

For ‘sky green’ I know that ‘sky’ is a word that these kids know, but I guess the association is lost when they start talking about colors. As for Japan English, I guess they just associate all foreign languages under the blanket term ‘English’, and this isn’t really such a stretch since even for me the word ‘English’ conjures thoughts of impossible grammar rules and mind-boggling verb tenses.