My daughter uses “the latter and the former” correctly in casual conversations, and my students use apostrophe to denote the plural.
The Irony
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
My daughter uses “the latter and the former” correctly in casual conversations, and my students use apostrophe to denote the plural.
Clarissa's Blog 
Apostrophes are hard.
For people who don’t read.
My 5yo’s new favorite word is “apparently”, which he uses correctly. But he’s pretty sure an “apprenticeship” is a type of boat, and a “barbarian” is the person who digs graves at the cemetary, because the word “bury” is in there somewhere.
Kids are all adventurers in the field of speculative etymology.
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That’s funny, I remember as a kid thinking to plot something was to fall on the floor like a blob because of the way it sounded. I also thought babysitting meant to literally sit on a kid, kids really do come up with weird etymologies for words
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I was, once, terrified of the “undertoad” at the beach. Was pretty certain it was something that would bite.
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” terrified of the “undertoad” at the beach”
Never had that one, but I do remember the dreaded undertow (which I imagined as an almost conscious malovent current looking for careless swimmers to pull under…
My brother once mentioned that airplane wings had skeletons inside them and I came to a very rational conclusion: Planes few due to some kind of magic that required human bones in the wings…
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Oh! It’s undertow!
Ok, now I get it, funny! I need jokes explained to me or it’s useless.
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It’s a grew-up-in-FL thing. You see Cliff got it 😉
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I think it’s just one of those Florida kid things. We were *all* conditioned to fear the undertow. It was bigger than any monster or boogeyman.
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We have those on the Pacific coast too. They and tsunamis were always on the prowl. The personified water in the Moana movie felt remarkably familiar.
My younger brother also called it undertoad.
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“Florida kid things. We were *all* conditioned to fear the undertow”
What about cramps if you swim too soon after eating? I heard that one non-stop…. is that even a possiblity?
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Oh, gosh, *everybody* warned us about it. We ignored that one, and it never once actually happened to me or anybody I knew. I think it’s a myth. The other one was “you’ll get skin cancer”… I’m not old enough to verify whether or not that one was true. But my mom was obsessive about us staying in the shade between 11am and 3pm. Probably not the worst idea, given our fair/freckled germano/celtic complexions. Still, what a drag on summer vacation, with the water *right there* all day long… fortunately, we knew a lot of card games. We still, somehow, managed to get at least one blistering sunburn per year. Usually involved boats.
The one thing they warned us about all the time that was definitely for-real dangerous and also we ignored them, was playing in the air pockets under the raft. None of us died, but there were some close calls.
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I never heard of an undertoad.
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It was the sort of thing parents warned you about every time you went near the water, that they spoke amongst themselves in hushed tones (and of course we eavesdropped), and… yeah I misheard it.
I thought it might be something like a kelpie, or Jenny Greenteeth. Terrifying water-monsters. But, you know… maybe smaller. Because toads.
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Yeah, they can have their own ways to begin reasoning. I remember my adopted daughter “helping” plant peas, she as still wee, two maybe three, still had some baby fat. We planted peas about an inch apart in in a foot wide strip down the row. I was busily explaining that we would then get more peas because the vines climb each other as they went up the net. She came back to my wife and said, “Papa says that the peas like to cuddle” ;-D
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