Words

Somehow, Eddie has determined that certain classes of words aren't useful, and he doesn't deign to recognize their existence. These include prepositions, articles, and auxiliary verbs. He's memorized the titles of most of his books—but only the important words. "A Kiss for Little Bear," for instance, he calls "Kiss Little Bear." "Ghosts in the House" is "Ghosts House," "The Cat in the Hat" is "Cat in Hat," and so on. He clearly doesn't have trouble remembering lots of words, since we have a lot of books, but he's not going to bother with fluff!

He also economizes if he's repeating what we tell him to say. If we ask him to say "May I have some apple, please?" he pares it down: "Apple please!"

He picked up a new word a couple of weeks ago and started using it all the time, but we couldn't understand what it meant. It sounded like "okoonk" or "ahdoon." We wondered if it meant skunk, or what? He seemed to use it in response to questions, but about such widely varied topics (types of food, or types of clothes, or what he'd done earlier...) that we couldn't imagine what he might be trying to get at. For a while, I thought that he'd come up with a good word, and was just trying it out on everything until he came up with what it meant. Then, the other day, I finally realized that he was saying "I dunno!"

Now it's clear why "ahdoon" is the answer to questions about every topic under the sun. Now that we understand, we've given him a little guidance about how to say it, and it's getting slightly more understandable, but it's still pretty strange (I doubt anyone but us would recognize it as "I dunno.")