My five year old has been exploring the limits of language lately in an attempt to quantify his world and interpret the secret language of parents. He has been unremitting in trying to pin us down on the meaning of such words as "sometimes", "soon", "later", "maybe", "a few" etc.
These wonderfully malleable words are of course the type of words most often employed by harried parents unwillingly to commit to a definitive answer to a child's plea for permission to do something. To commit in the affirmative is an unbreakable covenant to the child and will invariably result in years of therapy to reverse the harm done by promise-breaking parents. To commit in the negative will result in a "scene" of Old Testament proportions. To equivocate creates a temporary reprieve during which the parent hopes that the advance invasion force of aliens from Chocolatacon7 will arrive, distracting the child and causing him to forget the original request/question, or that an affirmative answer will somehow become possible, perhaps revealed by an image of the Virgin Mary appearing in the plate of leftover surprise in the back of the refrigerator, miraculously uncovered while searching for something to feed the kids.
I think my son is starting to get the nuances of parent-speak. The other day he came up to me and asked, "Is 'we'll see' another way of saying 'no'?"
Thinking that I can't let him figure us out too much, I told him, "Sometimes" but I think he knows.
Peace
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