10 January 2012

Verily, verily

Babies are a syntactically backwards race. They remember the last word of a familiar phrase or sentence and that word comes to function as a sort of synecdoche for the whole meaning. A small child's Lord's Prayer sounds like: "Father. Heaven. Name. Come. Done. Heaven. Bread." Etc. But a very small child's prayer is always, actually and effectively, "Amen."

8 comments:

Jane said...

Often times about halfway through the Lords prayer we would start hearing a quiet chant. "men, men, men, men, men ..." Then as we finished the prayer, the baby would let out a resounding MEN (not having mastered the first syllable yet). I think my children associate amen with "now I get to eat" at a very young age.

Katy said...

Ha! My boys love the Doxology's 'O's
(flow, below, Ghost).

Delawaremamma said...

Were you just in my house 20 minutes ago? I also love how more words work their way in as weeks and months pass.

@Jane: My mom tells a story about a night we sat down to a Summer supper of salads and cold sandwiches. My father began the meal, "Let us pray". To which my four year old brother interrupted, "Why? Our food is not hot".

The Rev. BT Ball said...

Hey, I like the "What blog is this?" ripping off of the motto of my home state. Very nice.

Rebekah said...

I love your state. Not your weirdo peninsula, though. :D

McDermotter said...

Sounds exactly like my 3 year old's Lord's prayer complete with the AAAA-MEN!

Emily Cook said...

my littlest sits and nods while he waits for his dinner- nods us into praying.. and nodding is his prayer. I love it!

Melrose said...

I love hearing my little ones pray like this. I think their prayers are much more earnest even lacking words than my rattling off to get them into bed.