Children Should Come to Terms : A Kindergartner Recently Defined <i> Debate</i> as ‘What You Fish With’

Every child ought to have his or her own dictionary, but I suspect that most homes have no dictionary at all.

Children learn the language from their parents, from their peers and from television. (They spend five minutes a day reading for pleasure and four hours watching TV.)

Oh, well, that’s enough to give them a functional vocabulary.

But if they never look up definitions, or if no one defines words for them, they have to rely on textual inference. That is, they have to guess.

Thus, if they read or hear “I was exhausted by the climb,” they will probably infer that exhausted means tired , or maybe very tired . If they hear “My energy was exhausted,” they might guess that exhausted means used up , and of course they’d be right.

But it isn’t always that easy. What if they hear “I was disconsolate”? They aren’t likely to infer the meaning of disconsolate . It might mean tired , too. Or ill . Or angry .

Small children live in a world of signals that they don’t fully understand. But our species has a genius for language, and they soon learn to cope.

Joan Maturko, a kindergarten teacher at Jefferson School, Redondo Beach, conducts an annual exercise that shows us how difficult it is for children to understand the words they hear--especially the abstract words that define the adult world they live in.

She simply asks her kindergartners to define words. The results demonstrate the unreliability of textual inference. But while the children make disastrous miscalculations, at the same time they make brilliant insights. We laugh and we applaud.

The children’s definitions are published in a booklet called “A Book of Words,” which is given to their parents.

Here are some examples from the 1986 edition:

Adore : “People go in and out from it. . . . You open it and you can go outside and play.”

Naturally, children have trouble with homonyms, as we do. We might have the same trouble with boar and bore .

Bachelor was too much for them: “When you bake something . . . when people are baking a pizza.”

Maybe bachelors are so numerous today that the word has lost its panache.

Behave : “Be good. . . . Don’t be bad. . . . Do things that your Mom tells you to do.”

Those definitions are about as good as any. Behave is a word that children know. By the way, the dictionary says, “to conduct oneself in a correct or proper way; do the right things.” So “be good” isn’t bad.

Sometimes they’re hilarious. Debate : “What you fish with.”

Extinct : “When a dinosaur dies and there’s only bones left.”

Sometimes the definitions are strangely out of tune with our times. Faint : “When someone says something about a lady, she faints.”

Now where could a kindergartner have come by that old-fashioned notion?

Family : “When you have a sister, a brother, a mother, and a father and you share with them and it’s a wonderful family.”

That one sounds almost out of date, too.

Consider the definition of problem : “When something’s happening that’s just not right like when your mother is living in the house and your father is living in another house, there’s problems.”

Their definitions of marriage are basic: “When you just get married and you have a baby. . . . When you meet a man and you want to marry him.”

I would define marriage today as one of a series of temporary, legalized cohabitations.

Their definition of history suggests the general decline of history as a subject of interest to children. History : “When you bump into a big guy and he says, ‘If you do that again, you’re history.’ . . . When somebody remembers you forever.”

Their definitions of science , although primitive, seem to get to the basic function of that discipline. Science : “When you find some dinosaur bones and you take them to your office. . . . When you find out something.”

That’s all Einstein was doing--trying to find out something.

One definition of secretary suggests that this child hasn’t yet been indoctrinated by the women’s movement: “When you’re a lady working.”

While personal and limited, like most of their definitions, one child’s definition of surprise at least is graphic. Surprise : “When you’re out somewhere and you walk in the door and people yell ‘Surprise!’ and throw balloons.”

Their definition of terminate obviously comes directly from “Miami Vice.” Terminate : “When you get terminated and you get shot.”

Inevitably, they define vacuum as a household item, not a natural phenomenon. Vacuum : “It’s something that cleans your house. . . . It sucks up the little trash things.”

And they did better with zucchini than I would have at their age. Zucchini : “It’s a food you eat. . . . It’s a vegetable.”

I would have guessed it was an Italian tenor.

I wonder how the kindergartners would have done with disinformation .