I am not a parent, and this observation will not come as news to those who are--hell, probably not to most who aren't.
But: damn, they sure make a lot of them, don't they?
Maybe it's a sign that I've been hitting the (family-friendly) fast-food joints too often lately, or maybe it's just that summer brings out the boisterousness in us all; but it strikes me that this phenomenon has been on the upswing lately. next seat over, next table over, next bench over: small child, going
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
frrrrrfFRMFRMFRMFRMfrmffrmfrmFRM
mba. mba. mba. mba.
YOBABOBOBOBOBOBO
lolololo
and sometimes just a primal, guttural screech that doesn't seem to have enough letters in the English language to represent it.
oh, I don't mind. well, not usually. i mean, no more so than your average hair-trigger New York adult (the noises we emit: FUCK YOU! NO, FUCK *YOU*, motherFUCKER!!), probably. I'm just curious. i keep thinking: why is it so hard for oh say your average acting class or group therapy session or whatnot to coax out those sounds from a lot of people? when do we unlearn?
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Yeah, we learned some terms for that in Human Development. "paralanguage," was it?
but, too, I'm talking about kids who're old enough to talk. like, young-school age. just happily screeching for no apparent reason.
Happy screeching. Good lord. I screech back at The Boy. It baffles him. Mmm...perhaps I truly am emotionally undeveloped. Tho, I use 'fuck you' quite a bit, as well. And apparently too loosely. The Boy told the SO 'fuck you' about dinner the other night. Yes. I was blamed immediately.
Belledame-your patience is honorable. I cringe at the animal sounds and behaviors of children. I don't know what my problem is but lately I find little humans intolerable.
oh, sometimes I just scream back.
the great thing about New York is that you can totally invoke your inner three year old whilst marching down the corridor between subway lines at Tiems Square at rush hour, say, and no one blinks at you, because they're all half-or-totally crazed themselves, completely wrapped up in their own drama, frightened of your display of craziness and thus prudently giving you as wide a berth as is possible in a human sardine can, or some combination of the above.
did i say "great?" i meant "purgatorial." same diff, really.
Well, at least it's better than hell.
In my linguistics classes, we always heard that the critical age was around 7 years.
I think that *a* critical age is at 7, since there are probably several critical ages, but I was told that 12ish was the very last one.
I have to admit, when I'm in this situation, I often loudly declare, "I just remembered I need to get my birth control prescription refilled." Although when it's my bf's kids, I don't mind at all.
From the angle of voice training, these sounds seem to live in the places where the ease of breathing you had as a child went. That is, in addition to a child's linguistic development, she also learns to disconnect the voice from the breath in ways that mean adults rarely can physically make those noises the way a child can. In my voice-breath class in college, we spent a lot of time trying to find these sounds, and when someone did, they often erupted in tears, suddenly remembering the trauma that caused them to control and measure the breath's connection with the voice using a defensive posture or tension.
I'm not articulate enough to say this, and it's the sort of vaguely cheesy thing analytic types such as myself usually reject out of hand, but I saw it happen a lot, and when I read Patsy Rodenberg's The Right to Speak, I realized why. Learning to make those noises is a combination of relearning no-longer-familiar phonemes, but also decreasing conscious control of the voice's connection with breath.
[/silly hippy-sounding whatnot, be gentle]
Not silly, not hippy; it's quite true. I think I have that book as well, "Right to Speak."
If you get me going, I can assault adult ears with a barrage of sounds that few adults--or babies--could make. I guess my babble gland never atrophied.
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