How Molly has impressed me recently

[naomikritzer]

Molly was trying to do a newspaper crossword puzzle today (without a lot of success, though she did get that "saw" is a three-letter word for a tool with teeth) and asked me to explain a clue that included the mysterious word "MMXVI." I said, "Oh, that's a Roman numeral. M means a thousand, so MM is two thousand, and -- "

And she interrupted me and said, "Oh, I know the rest. That's sixteen."

I wrote out XIV and asked her if she could read that one, too, and she initially read it as sixteen, but as soon as I told her she was wrong, she said, "oops, I mean fourteen." And then she correctly read XIX.

I asked her where on earth she'd learned to read Roman numerals and she said that she'd seen them in chapter headings in the Chronicles of Narnia and had gotten curious, so Ed has explained them to her. Ed read her the Chronicles of Narnia back when she was four, and Ed says he hasn't explained them to her since then. She is currently three months shy of seven, so it's been a while.

In terms of freaky skills for a six-year-old, Ed thinks this beats out her mad grammar skillz, but I'm not sure I agree. Molly strolled up while I was cutting up carrots last week and asked, "for whom are you slicing those?" She also conscientiously uses "may I" rather than "can I," because a character in one of her books got corrected, and she is similarly careful about me vs. I.

Ed thinks that she uses "whom" correctly because she hears and reads it used correctly. But I was raised by a copyeditor, and I didn't get who and whom straightened out until sometime in high school. And even if you got my mother drunk I don't think you'd be able to get her to say "me and my friends went to the park," and yet I remember my mother correcting me for that for years. Admittedly, for most of that time, I knew the correct usage, I just refused to use it about a third of the time, probably in part because I knew it irritated my mother.

Comments

[cmpriest.livejournal.com]

My little brother did the wacky grammar thing too, starting around 3 or 4 years old. It was all this, "We are all going to the store, are we not?" and "I am coming too, am I not?"

We have no idea where he picked it up, but boy did it draw stares from strangers ...

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I became good at Roman numerals when I was quite young because the clock in my room had Roman numerals.

...let me amend this. I became quite good at X, V, and I. To this day the rest of them take a little thought for me.

As for the "whom" thing? Totally awesome. Can she give my students some schoolin'? (I hope she's interested in Latin someday as she will clearly be a natural. *g*)

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Wow. Way to go, Molly -- you rule! :D

I used to say "Me and Jackie went to the store" a lot when I was that age, precisely because it annoyed the heck out of my parents (a linguistics professor and an ESL teacher/copy editor/Italian teacher/translator, respectively). Eventually the endless corrections took, though, and now I wince whenever I hear that construction. Still working on that with DD -- it would help if her beloved Little Critter books weren't full of constructions like "Me and my friends played football all afternoon" ::wince::.

[yankee-in-texas.livejournal.com]

I bet it's from all the book-larnin' you're letting her get. Switch her to a pure TV diet and she'll sound much more average.

My daughter, same age more or less, also says old-fashioned correct-grammer stuff. "For" instead of "because" is the most common example. I remember talking like that too. It was fun. I used "thee" and "thou" sometimes. Man, it still bugs the crap out of me when people get those wrong.

Now the memory involved in the Roman numerals thing... that is scary.