Human speech is an amazing thing! We go from tiny, screaming infants to grown-ups with vocabularies of prodigious sizes. I think I read a statistic once that b/t 12-24 months, a kid can learn almost 20 new words a day...incredible! While the human vocabulary is quite amazing, there is a problem with it growing so quickly before a person reaches the age of reason...and how words often get lost in translation.
When Andrew was little, 'ba-ba' meant 3 different things. 'Baba' was pacifier; 'baba' was buddy; and 'baba' was bottle - depending on which syllable was accented. This took a while to decipher (God help me if I ever have to learn chinese!).
Then there was the time we visited a mall with a (fake) alligator...and Andrew kept talking about the alligator at Pop-pop's office. And how the alligator beeped (the fake one actually roared, which made this all the more confusing). After a couple weeks of hearing about the mysterious beeping alligator, we realized that the alligator he was talking about was actually the 'elevator' at Jim's very tall office building.
This brings us to 'hershey-does-its' and 'hot doctors'.
Andrew loved 'hershey-does-its' - he still does!! They brought a smile to his face, wild motions from his hands and utter frustration that mom & dad obviously had absolutely NO idea what in the world he was trying to say!
Peter recently had the same problem with things being lost in translation - he kept saying 'hot doctors' over and over again - very emphatically. Pointing at the sky or his shirt, repeating it over & over again...occasionally adding 'Thomas' after 'hot doctors'. I would politely repeat it a few times...and then wonder WHERE in the world he'd learned to put the word 'hot' with 'doctors'?!?! Is he watching soaps on the sly?!?! What the heck?!
Fortunately, for the boys - and for us, the mystery of 'hershey-does-its' and 'hot doctors' was eventually solved. "Hershey-does-its' was Andrew's 1-year-old way of saying 'tasty donuts' - a treat Jim would occasionally indulge us in on a lazy Saturday morning. "Hot Doctors" are really NOT hot doctors (in case you were wondering, there were no soaps being watched on the sly)...it's Peter's way of saying 'helicopters'.
I can't wait to see what they'll come up with next!
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