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My son and I have been sick the last two weeks. We’ve spent our time in bed or in our respective bedrooms; him listening to an Ivanhoe book-on-tape; me reading British novels. He actually is a bit more cultured than I am as he is listening to Sir Walter’s Scott’s classic novel. I’m reading modern British novels along the lines of Bridget Jones’s Diary .

We’re both starting to talk like Brits.

It often amazes me how different British and English speak are. Children in England learn the word lorry, for truck and loo, for toilet. In Ivanhoe’s time (Richard The Lion-Hearted’s reign), they of course had neither of these. They barely had an America actually.

So, while, from reading my British novels, my speech has been recently littered with modern British-isms, his tends toward the old fashioned. Forsooth, wherefore and other old English-isms crop up with alarming frequency these days.

I do think he is becoming a bit of a snob.

Still, it has certainly increased his vocabulary. He also now uses words like lethargy and diligence… correctly. His sentence structure is, at times, better than mine. And his mix-ups are nothing if not amusing.

He told me yesterday that his knights were getting ready to insult the castle. I of course wondered what they might say.

“Hey, castle, your towers look like pick-up sticks.” or

“ Oooh, don’t you ever clean out that moat? It looks like pea soup.”

This was so much fun for me in my sick bed that, I admit, it was awhile before I explained the difference between insult and assault. I can be cruel.

So, while I dread his return to school when he tries this new vocabulary on classmates, I look forward to further gains and perhaps enjoying learning a new word or two myself.

by MC Milker

[tags]kids, children, parents, parenting, fun, English, Britain, British, accent, sick[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by angelocesare, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved