You're listening to Away With Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

When young children are first beginning to use language to describe the world,

they come up with some wonderful metaphors. And we had an example of that

on our Facebook group from Donna Aptor, who lives in West Hartford, Connecticut. She wrote,

At around the age of three, my dad had traveled to the U.S. with his family on a long journey

by sea from Europe during the large wave of immigration at the turn of the 20th century. Having been born and raised on his father's dairy farm in what was Austria

Hungary at the time, he had once shared with me how he had felt such wonder and amazement upon

discovering at that tender age that in this new world there

were cows in the middle of the ocean.

He's been gone 25 years now and it still warms my heart every time I think of this precious image of my father as a three-year-old, assuming that the recurrent sound of the ship's fog horn had offered him the opportunity

to hold on to a piece of his old world, Cal's mooing, as he transitioned to the whole new life that awaited him in America.

Oh, that's adorable.

Isn't that gorgeous?

C cows on the ocean.

I was thinking, maybe sea cows, maybe they were manatees, but no I know I was completely confused

But the power of metaphor right that that kids see that sometimes escapes us. Yeah

It's true.

We'd love to hear the stories that you tell in your family about the things that somebody said

that you still remember and you still all talk about.

877 929 967969 963 or email us at words at wayward video.org.

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