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 US 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 hungry 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.

What?

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 onto a piece of his old world, cows mowing,

as he transitioned to the whole new life that awaited him in America.

Oh, that's adorable. Isn't that gorgeous?

Cows on the ocean. I was thinking, maybe sea cows, maybe they were manatees, but no.

I know, I was completely confused.

The fog horn is so adorable as that.

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

Yeah, that'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 877-929-9673

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