I love words. I love reading books and writing blog posts and solving crossword puzzles. I'm teaching the grands to play the "three-letter word game". I correct grammar misspeaks when I hear them, as one is never too young to learn.
I've installed a "Hangman" app on my iPhone, which Boston loves to play. The app has two modes: one-player and two-player. In the one-player version, you can accept a random word or select a category from which words will be presented. In the two-player version, one player types in a word or phrase for the other player to solve.
(Ridley likes to select two-player, then close her eyes and randomly type letters. You can imagine I don't enjoy playing two-player with her.)
The other evening, Boston and I were playing two-player mode. He typed two words, and when I solved it, the words were "animal girraffe". I told him he had one extra "r" in giraffe, but that he had done a good job. He replied, "I wanted to put in the two little dots, one high and one low, to show that it was a definition, but I couldn't find them."
It took me a moment to realize he had been searching for the colon. He wanted to type "animal: giraffe". It took me only a nanosecond to be astonished that this almost-third-grader knew about definitions and colons, and to praise him for realizing the colon was the right punctuation to place after "animal".
I'm hoping he'll follow in my footsteps in the love of words.
(He's already started doing Sudoku puzzles, but that's a topic for another post.)
2 comments:
Hi Jan - read the last sentence in the first paragraph. :-)
Sorry, I couldn't resist- I too am a word nerd!
Hugs,
Mary
With a salute to my dear friend, Mary, in Tucson, for finding my goof in the first paragraph. You wouldn't believe what I go through to write these posts when I'm doing it from the office.
It's an exercise in typing quickly, cutting and pasting into blogger.com, and getting out quickly before the network police realize I've spent five minutes on non-work.
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