Naming the Fish

On Tuesday I took the children to the after hours clinic so that A. could have his collar bone checked. While we were in the waiting room th boys were checking out the fish tank. "Mum come and look at this! I found a plecostomus!" I watched as a little fish suckered onto the glass and huffed it's way up and down searching for algae.

"Ooh! have you found our vaccum-cleaner fish?" said the receptionist as she came over to talk to us.
"It's a plecostomus..."
She rolled her eyes. "Or a whatever it is you just said..." she laughed. "I'd love one of those to clean up my place!" she joked with the kids.
The other receptionist came over to us "Are you naming MY fish?" she smiled.
"I was just showing the kids your plecostomus..."
"uh, Plick...?"
"For short" joked the other woman.
"Pleco, for short." I smiled.

I know that a lot of people don't think it's relevant or worth their time to learn about the world around them. Perhaps the names of fish is a "waste of time" to learn. Unless you are talking to people with an interest in fish you don't really need to have specific names.. you can always say "the brown one"... or "the one with the frilly tail". The problem comes when people get scared of things with big names.

One of my hopes for my kids, is that they will want to find out about things because they are curious. I don't want them to be turned off finding something out just because they encounter a big word. Big words are not difficult or scary, yet plenty of people hide them from children fearing that it is "over their heads".

Newsflash; EVERYTHING is over a baby's head. These are all things that people become familiar with through time and experience. To a small child every phrase is just a pile of syllables. People shorten words like "hippopotamus" and yet never hide words like"library", or "refrigerator". Many phrases that little children are familiar with are like giant words to them - "justaminute!" has no component parts to a small person. It's just a collection of sounds strung together. And yet by the time we are adults we freak out at words we don't know.. alien ideas... the domain of "weird", "difficult", and an indicator of "I can't".

When I was growing up my family loved words - my grandfather in particular. He liked the way they felt to say, and he collected knowledge like it was treasure. He liked to know the Latin name for anything you could point to. When I was about 5 years old I found a sea-snail shell and he told me it was a "struthiolaria"!

Struth-io-laria... feels great to say. I was raised in a family where words were a game. They were fun, and challenging and approachable. Something you can do. We had other-language words too. My mother was raised in Fiji. My brother and I we heard common phrases that were just long strings of syllables. Phrases with meanings, but no distinct words. We learned the words later.

And we had adult words, and science words, and our father would break them down for us. "Bicycle" was taken apart and it meant "two" "wheels". Instead of the daunting mess of syllables we had parts of words with their own meanings. When we look at big words, we see the familiar building blocks of meaning. I was reading a book in 2011 and saw the word "ichthyophagus" and thinking back to my "fishy-lizard" ichthyosaurus.. and my "flesh eater" sarcophagus... I pieced together "fish eater". Words are a fun puzzle if you know how to play the game.

I don't expect my children to love language the way that I do, but I don't want them to fear it either. I want them to be able to embrace new things and not put them the "too-hard-basket". So for now, we use language to get our point across. We discuss "micro-organisms" rather than "germs", and "plecostomi" rather than "vacuumcleaner fish" but sometimes we just refer to "icky stuff" or "the sucky one".