Pod and Wod: Toddler Linguistics

Yet he still calls this his "pineapple shirt," hm...

A couple weeks ago, I was putting Son One to bed when he began demanding wod. "What are you talking about?" I asked. "I'm talking about wod," he replied, in his usual helpful way. Eventually I figured out that he was meant "water." A day or two later, when he was sitting on the potty, he informed me, "I call it pod."

This makes a certain amount of sense. Lots of things have a -y suffix at the end when you're a little kid, but which grown-ups don't actually use among themselves. It's "mom," not "mommy"; "dad," not "daddy"; "dog," not "doggy"; "flip-flops," not "flippy-floppies." Growing up is getting rid of these.

A couple days after this, he was eating strawberries, and informed me, "I call them strawbears." They keep accumulating. They don't all follow the -y logic, but many of them do.

There's a good discussion of the origin of the -y diminutive (or hypocorism) here, reprinted from the journal Studia Anglica Posnaniensia. Kenneth Shields argues that "caretaker speech" (the tendency of caretakers to modify their speech to mimic children's and thus enable language acquisition) caused parents to turn "babe" into "baby," and rebracketing led people to parse the -y as a diminutive suffix and thus apply it to other words. Shields even says, "Of course, pre-extant forms terminating in -y, -ie were [...] unaffected by the appearance of the new suffix (e.g., berry < OE berige)," but Son One has proved him wrong!

A current list of known Son One shortenings:

• wod for "water"
• pod for "potty"
• strawbear for "strawberry"
• pine for "pineapple"
• baig for "bagel"
• cand for "candy" 
• ties for "tiles"
• dupes for "Duplos"
• blank for "blanket"
  
• mar for "mama"
• dad for "daddy" (he piped up with this one himself when Hayley and I were trying to remember them all, so he thinks it counts)